An essay about biogeographical regionalization

Abstract

A biogeographical regionalization is a hierarchical system to categorize geographic areas in terms of their biotas. This hierarchy involves the levels of realm, region, dominion, province and district, with province being the basic level. Many regionalizations have been proposed to categorize biogeographic areas. Some of them are based on the total similarity of their biota; however, the identification of patterns of geographic homology (through the search for successively nested areas of endemism) is a basic requirement for proposing schemes of natural regionalizations. In this paper, I describe the main concepts and methods to identify biogeographical patterns used to build natural biogeographical regionalizations.