Students from Turkey on an internship at the UW Herbarium

28 09 2026

At the University of Warsaw Herbarium – a facility of the Faculty of Biology and a research group within CNBCh – two students from Üsküdar University in Istanbul, Elif Elif Müberra Şayan and Doğukan Aydin, completed a two-month Erasmus internship in August and September this year. During their stay, they explored the specifics of working with natural history collections, focusing on the taxonomic updating of the collections and taxonomic revisions. Their project was based on specimens held in the UW Herbarium that were collected in Turkey in 1925 by Hanna Czeczott.

The choice of students from Turkey was not accidental. Turkey is one of the most floristically diverse countries in Europe and the Mediterranean region, with a particularly high proportion of endemic species. At the same time, the potential of Turkish collections and biodiversity data for digitization and open access through international systems such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is still being developed.

The University of Warsaw has extensive experience in this area. It actively supports the digitization and open sharing of biodiversity data, while the Polish GBIF node is based at CNBCh UW. Internships such as this one therefore provide an opportunity not only to work with historical collections, but also to gain practical knowledge of documenting, digitizing, and sharing scientific collections.

Building relationships with the younger generation of Turkish researchers is therefore an investment in long-term cooperation. Turkey is a country of great importance for research into plant diversity, and connections established at an early stage of an academic career can in the future lead to joint projects, data exchange, and the development of international cooperation around natural history collections. Our collaboration also contributes to the increasingly close academic relations between Poland and Turkey and the growing mobility of students and researchers between the two countries.

We hope that their time at the UW Herbarium will be not only a valuable research experience, but also the beginning of further encounters and joint initiatives.

Students from Üsküdar University during their internship at the UW Herbarium with their supervisors, Dr Maja Graniszewska and Dr Kamil Frankiewicz