Dark coniferous forests of West Siberian plain on their southern limit
West Siberian subtaiga is a climatically and partly edaphically determined latitudinal subzone with deciduous forests dominated by birch and aspen trees as climax vegetation (Shumilova, 1962). Dark coniferous forests have here their southern limit of distribution and they are presented by the relatively small “islands” embedded into the “matrix” of deciduous forests mixed with meadows and arable lands. Main limited factor for the coniferous trees distribution is low humidity during vegetation period. Therefore the dark coniferous forests in subtaiga occupy the habitats with high and constant moisture. They are mainly the big rivers terraces or small river valleys. The total area of this habitat type is quite small. There are no special articles or monographs devoted to this vegetation. At the same time these dark coniferous forests are rich in species and they are a shelter of many rare and protected plants. The main goal of this article is to describe the composition, structure, distribution and syntaxonomical position of West Siberian dark coniferous forests on their southern limit. The article is based on 103 relevés collected through the West Siberia from Kemerovskaya region at the east to Omskaya region at the west from 1998 till 2014. All relevés were stored in a data base and developed by syntaxonomical analysis with IBIS 6.2 (Zverev, 2007), ordination and cluster analysis with PAST 2.14 (Hammer et al., 2001) and using the Ramensky ecological scales (Korolyuk, 2006).