Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e55063 doi: 10.3897/BDJ.8.e55063 Research Article Additions to the “Martian Flora”: new botanical records from the Mars Desert Research Station, Utah Paul C. Sokoloff‡, David A. Murray§, Samantha R.M. McBeth|, Michael G. Irvine¶, Shannon M. Rupert§ ‡ Beaty Centre for Species Discovery, Canadian Museum of Nature, Gatineau, Canada § Mars Society, Lakewood, United States of America | Independent Researcher, Gatineau, Canada ¶ Live It, Victoria, Canada Corresponding author: Paul C. Sokoloff (
[email protected]) Academic editor: Gianniantonio Domina Received: 03 Jun 2020 | Accepted: 03 Jul 2020 | Published: 18 Aug 2020 Citation: Sokoloff PC, Murray DA, McBeth SR.M, Irvine MG, Rupert SM (2020) Additions to the “Martian Flora”: new botanical records from the Mars Desert Research Station, Utah. Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e55063. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e55063 Abstract The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is a Mars-simulation campus set in a Martian planetary analogue in southern Utah. Despite a long history of astrobiology research, collections-based taxonomic inventories of the macro-level biodiversity around the station are relatively new. This study serves to add to the initial vascular plant list published for the station in 2016, where 39 species were recorded for MDRS. Here we report 40 new species, two new taxa recorded only to genus and two species re-identified from our 2016 fieldwork, bringing the total number of taxa in the "Martian" flora to 79 species and two taxa recorded to genus. Keywords Floristics, Utah, Mars analogue, botany © Sokoloff P et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.