Technical Refereed Contribution Phylogeny and biogeography of the Sarraceniaceae

The carnivorous plant family Sarraceniaceae in the order Ericales consists of three genera: Dar-lingtonia, Heliamphora, and Sarracenia. Darlingtonia is represented by one species that is found in northern California and western Oregon. The genus Heliamphora currently has 23 recognized species all of which are native to the Guiana Highlands primarily in Venezuela with some spillover across the borders into Brazil and Guyana. Sarracenia has 15 species and subspecies, all but one of which are located in the southeastern USA. The range of Sarracenia purpurea extends into the northern USA and Canada. Closely related families in the plant order Ericales include the Roridu-laceae consisting of two sticky-leaved carnivorous plant species, Actinidiaceae, the Chinese goose-berry family, Cyrillaceae, which includes the common wetland plant Cyrilla racemiflora, and the family Clethraceae, which also has wetland plants including Clethra alnifolia. The rather charismatic plants of the Sarraceniaceae have drawn attention since the mid 19th century from botanists trying to understand how they came into being, how the genera are related to each other, and how they came to have such disjunct distributions. Before the advent of DNA sequencing it was very difficult to determine their relationships. Macfarlane (1889, 1893) proposed a phylogeny of the Sarraceniaceae based on his judgment of the overlap in features of the adul