Nikolai Turczaninow

Nikolai Stepanovich Turczaninow (Николай Степанович Турчанинов, 1796 in Nikitovka, now in Krasnogvardeysky District, Belgorod Oblast, Russia – 1863 in Kharkov) was a Russian botanist and plant collector who first identified several genera, and many species, of plants.

Education and career
Born in 1796, Turczaninow attended high school in Kharkov. In 1814, he graduated from Kharkov University, before working as a civil servant for the Ministry of Finance in St. Petersburg. Soon after, in 1825, Turczaninow published his first botanical list. Despite being employed in a different field, he continued his largely self-taught botanical work.

In 1828, he was assigned an administrative post in Irkutsk, Siberia. This allowed him to collect in the Lake Baikal area, which is known for its rich biodiversity. A spate of papers followed, and Turczaninow established his own herbarium containing plants from the region. In 1830, he was appointed a Fellow of the Imperial Botanic Garden St. Petersburg (now the Saint Petersburg Botanical Garden), and charged with collecting plants from Siberia. In the early 1830s, Turczaninow published numerous papers on the botany of Siberia and Mongolia, most of which appeared in the Bulletin de la Société impériale des naturalistes de Moscou.

During his career, Turczaninow corresponded and exchanged specimens with eminent botanists of the era, including Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, George Bentham, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Joachim Steetz, among others.

In 1837, he was sent to Krasnojarsk where he continued to publish botanical names. He also became governor of the region.

Turczaninow later opened a herbarium in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. After a debilitating fall, he allowed others to collect for him and he spent his time in classification, study and writing. In particular, Turczaninow began work on collections sent to him from the Swan River Colony in Western Australia by botanist James Drummond. Despite never visiting the country, he published over 400 species of Australian flora.

Turczaninow eventually moved back to Kharkov in 1847, taking most of his herbarium with him. Many of these specimens, including known type specimens, were transferred to the National Herbarium of Ukraine (KW). Many herbaria around the world also hold collections made by Turczaninow, including the Komarov Botanical Institute, the National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, Harvard University Herbaria and the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Standard author abbreviation
Turczaninow named almost 2500 plant species. See: Category:Taxa named by Nikolai Turczaninow and International Plant Name Index

Prizes

 * 1857: Demidov Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Legacy

 * The open access journal Turczaninowia, which publishes on systematics and phylogeny of plants, study of plant diversity, florogenesis, anatomy and morphology of plants, is named after him.
 * Several plant species have been named after him, including Connarus turczaninowii, Hydrocotyle turczaninowii, and Sisymbrium turczaninowii. Also in 1836, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle published Turczaninovia, which is a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Russia to China, belonging to the family Asteraceae. It was named in Nikolai Turczaninow's honour.