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As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Here, we explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist.

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Eragrostis amurensis (type from Amur Oblast, Russian Far East) and E. voronensis (type from Tambov Oblast, Middle Russia) were separated from E. pilosa by the presence of glandular pits. The location of glands along with spikelet details was studied on specimens from Europe and N Asia; and E. voronensis is considered conspecific with E. amurensis. The newly circumscribed E. amurensis is a species of riverside habitats and is widely distributed in temperate Eurasia. It is recorded for the first time for Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Eragrostis amurensis has recently invaded some areas of Eastern Europe and is still colonizing new watercourses. It is not synonymous with the robust glandular North American E. perplexa (type from South Dakota, U.S.A.) which has longer lemmas and more florets in each spikelet.

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The herbaria of the World, with 387.5M specimens (Thiers, 2019), are being rapidly digitized. At least 77M plant specimens (20%) are already databased throughout the globe in the standard form of GBIF-mediated data. About 55M specimens are imaged, but only 21.6M of them are concentrated in the top-ten largest digital herbaria-P, L, NY, US, PE, BR, MEXU, MW, K, and MPU. The contribution of smaller herbaria has been steadily growing in the last few years due to cost reduction, and usage of platforms and solutions developed by the leaders. The global trend is largely the same in Russia, where a dozen herbaria started to scan their holdings after imaging the specimens of the nation's second-largest herbarium (Seregin, 2016). A web-resource, the Moscow Digital Herbarium (https://plant. depo.msu.ru/), was launched by Lomonosov Moscow State University in October, 2016 for publication of specimens imaged and databased in the Moscow University Herbarium (MW) (Seregin, 2018). From 2015 to 2018, a commercial partner scanned 93% of the regular herbarium collections at 300 dpi and 100% of the types at 600 dpi due to the financial support from the Russian Science Foundation. As of 31 December 2018, the web-portal included 968,031 images of 971,732 specimens. About one-third (i.e., 323,015 records) were georeferenced by that time. This dataset is available in GBIF (https://doi.org/10.15468/cpnhcc) since late 2017 and updated in a weekly synchronization mode.

A transition to selfing can be beneficial when mating partners are scarce, for example, due to ploidy changes or at species range edges. Here, we explain how self-compatibility evolved in diploid Siberian Arabidopsis lyrata, and how it contributed to the establishment of allotetraploid Arabidopsis kamchatica. First, we provide chromosome-level genome assemblies for two self-fertilizing diploid A. lyrata accessions, one from North America and one from Siberia, including a fully assembled S-locus for the latter. We then propose a sequence of events leading to the loss of self-incompatibility in Siberian A. lyrata, date this independent transition to ∼90 Kya, and infer evolutionary relationships between Siberian and North American A. lyrata, showing an independent transition to selfing in Siberia. Finally, we provide evidence that this selfing Siberian A. lyrata lineage contributed to the formation of the allotetraploid A. kamchatica and propose that the selfing of the latter is mediated by the loss-of-function mutation in a dominant S-allele inherited from A. lyrata.