Biogeographic regions and species pools are related concepts with important applications to community ecology, biogeography, macro-evolution and conservation biology. Biogeographic regions are biological units that exhibit dissimilarities in species assemblages between them, while they contain similar assemblages within them. They form the basis of comparisons for large-scale comparative studies.
Species pools relate to the set of species that can potentially colonize and persist in local communities. The species pool concepts has played a central role if the development of theories in community ecology and biogeography. The biogeographic regions wherein a species a community is found can act as a broadly defined species pool. However, realistically, species pools are likely unique to each individual community, and vary at least slightly in richness and composition between regions. As such, they should be defined for each community separately.
Our lab works on developing new concepts and methodologies relating to species pool definition, which can then be applied to questions relating to community assembly.