The Interdepartmental Educational and Scientific Laboratory Herbarium was established in 2007 in accordance with the decision of the Academic Council of the Biological Faculty, the Scientific and Technical Council and the order of the Rector of Samara State University. Since 2003, the Herbarium has been registered in Index Herbariorum as SMR. The idea of creating the Herbarium at Samara University belongs to Doctor of Biological Sciences, Honorary Professor Tamara Ivanovna Plaksina, who studied the flora of the Volga-Ural region for several decades.
The Herbarium is based on collections of vascular plants made by students of the Biological Department of the Chemical and Biological Faculty of Kuibyshev State University in June and July 1971 in the vicinity of the village of Rozhdestveno (Volzhsky District) and the village of Uzyukovo (Stavropol district) of Samara Oblast. In subsequent years, the collection was replenished mainly by biology students, postgraduate students, faculty and educational support staff of the Department of Ecology, Botany and Nature Conservation of Samara University, as well as botanists and geographers from other institutions.
Currently, the Herbarium contains four collections: vascular plants (over 35K specimens), lichens (over 10K specimens), bryophytes (ca. 800 specimens) and non-lichenized fungi (50 specimens). Since 2021, the Herbarium of Samara University has included the collection of the Samara State Social and Pedagogical University, numbering 6K+ herbarium specimens.
The vast majority of samples presented in the Herbarium of Samara University were collected in Samara and Orenburg Oblasts, but there are also collections from other regions.
In 2023, the Digital Herbarium of Samara University (https://herbarium.ssau.ru/collections) was created to expand public access to the created botanical collections. Digitization is performed on a Microtek ObjectScan 1600 scanner according to international standards with a resolution of 600 dpi. In April 2025, these data were duplicated in the Digital Herbarium of Moscow State University and published in GBIF.