He is considered as one of the first natural scientists who explored the importance of anthropogenic factors in the evolution and geographic distribution of higher plants.

[1] Valery Taliev was born in a small town of Lukoyanov of the Nizhny Novgorod Province, in the family of a teacher of the Mordovian ethnicity.

In 1916, Taliev defended his Doctoral Thesis in Petrograd University titled “A study of the process of species formation in living nature”.

For a half a century, students of many universities in Russia and the USSR learned to identify higher plants according to Taliev’s guides.

He outlined major parameters of the origin and spreading of weed plants, of the flora of riverbanks, and proposed a direct role of man in changing the balance between forests and steppes.

Thus, Taliev anticipated the role of anisotropy of chemical reactions in biological evolution, which is currently considered as an important basis of evolutionary pattern formation.

[8] In relation to post-glacial events, Taliev linked the evolutionary variability of plants to their spreading to new geographical areas determined by human activity.