Sergei Vasilievich Juzepczuk (1893–1959), Russian botanist.
Russian botanist. Sergei Vasilievich Juzepczuk was born in Moscow, graduated with a gold medal from the gymnasium in Riga in 1911, and studied botany under the guidance of V.L. Komarov at St Petersburg University until 1918. As a student, he studied the flora of the Tver province, north of Moscow, particularly the genera Alchemilla, Taraxacum and Dryas. It was his work on this last genus that attracted the attention of many taxonomists.
In 1919 he was appointed junior conservator of the herbarium of the Botanic Garden. As curator of the Caucasus section until 1925, and then of the European regions of the USSR, he made trips to the Caucasus, Middle Asia, Altai, the Urals and especially to the Crimea. From 1925 to 1928 he took part in an expedition to Central and South America. It was organised by the Rubber Trust and the Research Institute of Applied Botany and New Cultivated plants and was headed by G.J.N. Woronow, with S.M. Bukasov and others as participants. His collections from this expedition are rich in material from the genus Solanum and include several species new to science. In 1947 he, along with B.K. Schischkin, L.E. Rodin, and L.F. Pravdin, made a short expedition to Brazil, returning with a small herbarium of about 2000 sheets and a valuable gift to the Komarov Botanical Institute from the Botanic Garden of Rio de Janeiro, a collection of live tropical plants to replace some of the glass-house plants from the old collection which had been destroyed during an air raid in 1941.
Juzepczuk contributed to a number of collective publications by the Komarov Botanical Institute, such as The Weeds of Russia (1935), The Flora of the South-East of the European part of the USSR (1936), and especially the 30-volume Flora USSR. His treatments of the Linaceae, Cistaceae, and Violaceae earned him the Stalin Prize in 1952. In addition to his taxonomic work, he published a number of papers on the problem of species, foremost among which are "The problem of species in the light of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution" (1938), "C. Linnaeus and the problem of species" (1957), and "V.L. Komarov's concept of species, its historical development and its implementation" (1959). Juzepczuk died in Riga at the age of 66.
IPNI standard form: Juz.
