> I will be very interested if you could please locate these these regions by
> name for me geographically. If you could include the references which
> describe how -
>
> >the Sierra Nevada at 6,000 feet is ecologically and
> >>climatically quite similar to parts of central and southern Canada,
>
I don't want to divulge publicly the precise meadow(s) where S. flava has
been introduced in California because they include some of the
southernmost populations of Darlingtonia, but suffice to say that I have
seen the introduced plants in Plumas County, California. As for
references, I can't think of one off the top of my head, I guess because
the relationship between altitude and latitude has been understood since
Merriam's 1898 description of San Francisco peak in Arizona and his
introduction of the life zone concept, which has been revised by Dice in
"Biotic Provinces of North America." It's sort of like trying to name a
definitive reference for succession or competition. Anyway, many biotic
elements have extended literally from the boreal regions of Canada south
along the ecological corridor of the Cascades and the Sierra.
Darlingtonia, for one. Pine martens, Stellar's jays, rubber boas, sequoia
trees, wolverines, blue grouse, red fir, bigleaf maple, etc are all
apparently of northern (=Canadian) origin and dispersed southward along
the corridor into the Sierra and points south in some instances. Their
presence in the Sierra indicates that ecological and climatic conditions
are not sufficiently hostile to exclude them, that is, in fundamental ways
the Sierra Nevada biotic region resembles the Canadian more than it
resembles the rest of California's biotic regions. Further, the
mid- and high- Sierra coniferous forests are virtually identical in all
ecological respects except species composition to those of boreal Canada.
For a good discussion of the Sierra Nevada biota, see Storer and Usinger,
"Sierra Nevada Natural History," University of California Press.
Sean Barry