Additions to the Flora of Garvin County, Oklahoma: Including a Complete Vascular Plant Checklist

Abstract

A species list created from the Oklahoma Vascular Plants Database (OVPD) indicated that Garvin County, Oklahoma had been neglected by botanists. Our objective was to collect all vascular plant species encountered during three growing seasons to increase our botanical knowledge of the county. A total of 387 species were collected; 174 of these species had not been previously recorded for Garvin County in the OVPD. As a result, 14 families and 62 genera were added to the known flora of Garvin County. The majority of the species collected during this survey are assigned to five families of flowering plants: Poaceae (70 species), Asteraceae (63), Fabaceae (39), Cyperaceae (17), and Euphorbiaceae (16). Forty eight species (representing 13% of the taxa collected during this study) were not native to the United States; the families Poaceae and Fabaceae (with 18 and 10 species, respectively) exhibited the greatest number of introduced species collected in this survey. Five taxa on the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory working list of rare Oklahoma plants were encountered. This collection effort increased the total number of vascular plant species recorded in the Oklahoma Vascular Plants Database for Garvin County to 628 species.