Russian botanist celebrated for his regional floras, for the organisation of the Flora SSSR project and for various administrative roles within the Russian Academy of Sciences, including presidency. He studied under A.N. Beketov and began his career at the Imperial Botanic Garden in St. Petersburg from 1892, where he was named head of the Living Plants Department in 1902. During these years Komarov undertook numerous expeditions and published important works such as Flora of Manchuria (1901-1907) and the Introduction to the Floras of Mongolia and China (1908-1909). At the garden he was the principal researcher into central Asian plants and published numerous papers and monographs, as well as a teaching syllabus on medical plants (1915). By 1917 he was deputy director of the garden and in 1920 took up the chair of systematic botany at the Academy of Sciences. His next great achievement was his Flora peninsulae Kamtschatka (1927-1929) which was published around the same time as Eric Hultén's flora of this region, although the two were compiled in such a different style that both were equally useful.

In 1930 Komarov became the director of the botanic museum, which merged with thte botanic garden the following year to form the Botanic Institute which now bears his name. He soon began work as editor-in-chief on the mammoth Flora SSSR project, although he himself did not contribute a huge amount to its text which was published between 1935 and 1948. In 1934 the Academy of Sciences' headquarters moved to Moscow and Komarov was increasingly based there rather than in St. Petersburg, becoming its president in 1936. From this time onwards his contributions became more administrative than scientific, although he continued to edit the flora of Russia, albeit in a more patriarchal capacity. Also a professor at the Leningrad State University, he was keen to disseminate his knowledge and took an interst in public education. In his taxonomic work Komarov was an advocate of the elevation of geographical races to species level and was widely known as a "splitter", publishing The Concept of Species in Plants in 1940 for which he won the Stalin Prize. After the Second World War he was again commemorated by Stalin for his work as chairman of the Commission on Mobilisation of Resources of the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan, as a paramilitary botanist.

Sources:
S.G. Shetler, 1967, The Komarov Botanical Institute.