A floral checklist for Wheaton Regional Park, Montgomery County, Maryland

Wheaton Regional Park is a suburban 500-acre park in Montgomery County, Maryland on the northern edge of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Early floristic surveys of the park, conducted between 1961-1964 when the park was founded, showed the park to be diverse, with 443 taxa of vascular plants. Our research team conducted a second round of floristic surveys between 2014-2019 to update the checklist of plants in the park. Here, we present a comprehensive checklist of all species collected in the park over the past fifty years, discuss recent plant introductions, and share a platform for a digital flora of the park through the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis online portal. We documented 393 vascular plant species from the 1960s, as part of a comprehensive review of those collections. The 2010s collections recorded 293 vascular plant species, and an additional 16 species of bryophytes. In total, 554 species of plants (vascular and non-vascular) in 326 genera and 118 families have been recorde...