HISTORY OF TAXONOMIC MYCOLOGY IN BELARUS:
A BIBLIOGRAPHIC SURVEY

General overview

The earliest work on fungi from Belarus found in this survey is a manuscript by Russian naturalist A. Meier ‘Krichev County description', dated 1786, but published in Mogilev only in 1901. It includes 22 species of macrofungi in the list of plants and plant-like organisms,* but the application of most names, both Russian and Latin, is unclear.

Several publications of Polish naturalists, which included descriptions and distributional data on fungi from the present day Belarus area, occurred in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

The pioneering work by Józef Jundziłł (1830) lists 398 species of fungi, myxomycetes, and lichens in the second volume but, apart from a few species, there is no information on exact geographical localities. As Oksner (1924: 35) wrote, Jundziłł's list evidently includes the species found in Minsk province.

Two papers based on collections from Belavezhskaya Pushcha forests were published by Franciszek Błoński. Analysing his data on species geography, the taxa he reported can be classified into three categories: (1) those collected or observed undoubtedly or with great probability in that part of the Pushcha which is now in Belarus; (2) those possibly found in what is now Belarus but with unclear or insufficient data on locality; (3) those reported from what is now the Polish part of the Pushcha. The two first categories are considered further in this survey. In the paper, issued in 1888, he reported 114 species of non-lichenized fungi and myxomycetes and 37 lichens; in addition to these, 14 species of fungi and myxomycetes and 6 lichens have unclear locality data. In 1889 he published a list of 192 species of non-lichenized fungi and myxomycetes, some with morphological descriptions, plus 67 species of fungi, myxomycetes, and lichens with unclear locality data. In the introduction to his paper issued in 1888 Błoński wrote about the work of Brincken. In ‘Memoire descriptif sur la forêt de Bialowieza' published in Warszawa in 1826, Brincken mentioned for the Pushcha 2 species of Tuber, 3 genera without species epithets – Clavaria, Phallus, and Tremella, and 3 lichen species.

In the period 1904–1917 the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology at the Department of Agriculture (St-Petersburg) published a year-book collecting facts about diseases and damage to cultivated plants and useful wild plant. It also included, scattered throughout the text, data on fungi observed in what is now Belarus (e.g. Jaczewski, 1907).

In 1912, the Polish researcher Kastory reported 167 species of non-lichenized fungi collected in and around Vitsebsk and Orsha.

An account of a forest pathology survey in the central part of Belavezhskaya Pushcha was published in the same time (Dorogin, 1912). The author carried out collections and observations within a radius of 12.8 km from Belovezh railway station (now in Poland), without precise locality data. As a result, although the described area includes the centre of the Belarus part of Pushcha, the fungi recorded cannot firmly be ascribed to Belarus.

S. Schembel (1913), a worker from the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology at the Department of Agriculture, published a list of 113 species from various phyla collected in 1912 in Minsk guberniya**. In the period 1921–1939 what is now Belarus was divided approximately equally between Poland and the USSR. Research into fungi of the territories was carried out in both the Western (Polish) and Eastern (Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic) parts. An expedition by a team from the Spore Plants Institute (Petrograd), invited by Byelorussian People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), was undertaken in 1923 in the Soviet part of Belarus. The results were published in 1925: Savicz provided a list of 119 lichen species; Wyssotzky et al. reported 162 species of fungi, myxomycetes, and lichens, observed and collected in southeast and south Belarus. Lidiya Lebedeva, mycologist of Leningrad Main Botanic Garden, published three lists of fungi and myxomycetes, collected in central, southern, and southeast Belarus in 1923 by V.P. Savich, A.I. Belyaeva, and L.I. Savicz-Lyubitskaya (Lebedeva, 1925, Erstes…; 1925, Zweites…) and collected in 1925 in and around Minsk and Slutsk (Lebedeva, 1935).

Title page of the Mémoires de l'Institut agronomique et forestier d'état de la Bélarussie 4 (1925)

Route of the 1923 expedition headed by Prof. G.N. Wyssotzky.

The well-known Soviet mycologist and botanist Vasilii Kuprevich at the beginning of his scientific career studied fungi, mostly macroscopic species, as an amateur. He published an annotated list of 219 fungi and myxomycete species collected and observed in and around Smalyavichy (Minsk region) in 1930, when he was a teacher at a local school (Kuprevich, 1931, Fungi…). A preliminary paper on the same subject was published also in 1931 (Kuprevich, 1931, Harmful…). A rather species-rich list of macro- and microfungi occurs in the paper by Tumiłowiczówna (1935). It includes 233 species of non-lichenized fungi collected in 1931–1932 in Valkavysk (Wolkowysk) town and the ca 30 km around it.

After the 2nd World War, research on taxonomic mycology was confined to two main centres in Minsk: the Academy of Sciences of Belarus and the Belarusian State University. Inside the Academy of Sciences this research was carried out in the Department for Physiology and Systematics of Lower Plants, the Institute of Biology (afterwards the V.F. Kuprevich Institute of Experimental Botany), and the Central Botanical Garden. In addition, some recording of plant pathogenic fungi was done in the Belarusian Research Institute for Potato, Fruit, and Vegetable Growing (Samakhvalavichy, Minsk district), the Belarusian Research Institute of Plant Protection (Priluki, Minsk district), and the Belarusian Research Institute of Agriculture and Selection – afterwards Belarus Scientific Research Institute of Arable Farming and Fodders (Zhodzina, Minsk oblast).

In the 2nd part of 20th century the contents of publications in general became more specialized in respect of taxonomic groups, life form assemblages, or of the fungi recorded on certain plant species, genera, or families. Some books considered in this survey are, however, not taxonomically restricted and include a broad range of fungi from different phyla, e.g. Gorlenko (1969), Gorlenko and Pan'ko (1967, 1972), Dorozhkin et al. (1978, Fabaceous…), Gorlenko et al. (1988), Dorozhkin and Nitievskaya (1990), Gorlenko and Buga (1996), Belomesyatseva (2004). Some theses also considered fungi from different phyla, e.g. 26 species belonged to Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, and anamorphic fungi in Fedorov (1978).

The ‘Belarus Nature Encyclopaedia', a scientific popular 5-volume reference book, was published in the 1980s (Shamyakin et al., 1983–1986). It is an illustrated edition, written in Belarusian, and numbering in total 2767 pages. Its entries include data on many fungi and fungus-like organisms both recorded in Belarus and provisory for the mycobiota. For instance, the encyclopaedia includes 70 generic entries for lichenized fungi and 33 entries on polyporoid fungi.

		The main serials publishing papers of taxonomic contents in Belarus are Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus – Series of Biological Sciences (earlier Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR, Proceeding of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus), Vestnik BGU (Series 2), Doklady of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR, Botanika (published by Belarus Botanical Society), and Mycena: An independent mycological journal. Two mycological conferences were organized in Belarus in the 2nd half of the 20th century: in 1982 and 2004. The abstract books of this conferences included also the papers concerning fungal taxonomy.
Cover of the abstract book of IX Symposium of Baltic republics and Byelorussian SSR Mycologists and Lichenologists, which was hold in Minsk 17–19 November, 1982	Cover of the abstract book of an international conference on mycology, which was hold in Minsk 20–24 September, 2004

Each of the main taxonomic groups or life forms traditionally considered by mycologists is provided with a separate web page on this website, and on each page there is a review of the most important works relating to that group. Accepted classes and phyla follow the CABI Classification available on-line (Classification…, 2007). The main groups to receive the attention of Belarus workers are lichenized, agaricoid, and aphyllophoroid fungi. The two first groups are the most studied in the country in respect of species diversity.

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*The printed version of this antique paper contains typographic errors: two pages in the section ‘Plants and fungi' were omitted.
**guberniya = government, province