The zoogeographical domains: a new conservation target at global scale

Zooregions are classifications of the Earth’s surface based on characteristic species assemblages. Consequently, zooregions reflect how ecological, evolutionary, and historical processes have been acting over millions of years, arguably making them the largest entities to conserve the uniqueness of the species assemblages on Earth. Because species are distributed along zooregions heterogeneously, to conserve zooregions adequately, we need to protect their characteristic areas (transition, core or endemic areas), what we call the zoogeographical domains. Here we propose a method to characterize the zoogeographical domains basing on four metrics, which are independently used in macroecologica…