The ecological and biogeographical concept of the species pool describes all

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

available that could potentially

colonize Colonization, or colonisation, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gain advantage over other inhabitants of the territory. When ...

and inhabit a focal

habitat In ecology, the term habitat summarises the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical ...

area. The concept lays emphasis on the fact that "local

communities A community is a Level of analysis, social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place (geography), place, Norm (social), norms, religion, values, Convention (norm), customs, or Identity (social science), identity. Communiti ...

aren't

closed system A closed system is a natural physical system that does not allow transfer of matter in or out of the system, although — in contexts such as physics, chemistry or engineering — the transfer of energy (''e.g.'' as work or heat) is allowed. In ...

s, and that the species occupying any local site typically came from somewhere else", however, the species pool concept may suffer from the logical

fallacy of composition The fallacy of composition is an informal fallacy that arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. A trivial example might be: "This tire is made of rubber, therefore the ve ...

. Most local communities, however, have just a fraction of its species pool present. It is derived from MacArthur and Wilson's

Island Biogeography Theory Insular biogeography or island biogeography is a field within biogeography that examines the factors that affect the species richness and diversification of isolated natural communities. The theory was originally developed to explain the pattern of ...

that examines the factors that affect the

species richness Species richness is the number of different species represented in an ecological community, landscape or region. Species richness is simply a count of species, and it does not take into account the abundances of the species or their relative a ...

of isolated natural communities. It helps to understand the

composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography *Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include v ...

and richness of local communities and how they are influenced by biogeographic and

evolutionary process Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation t ...

es acting at large spatial and temporal scales. The absent portion of species pool—

dark diversity Dark diversity is the set of species that are absent from a study site but present in the surrounding region and potentially able to inhabit particular ecological conditions. It can be determined based on species distribution, dispersal potential a ...

—has been used to understand processes influencing local communities. Methods to estimate potential but absent species are developing. It has been hypothesized that there might be a direct correlation between species richness and the size of the species pool for

plant communities A plant community is a collection or association of plant species within a designated geographical unit, which forms a relatively uniform patch, distinguishable from neighboring patches of different vegetation types. The components of each plant ...

. Elsewhere, it was reported that "trade-offs and species pool structure (size and trait distribution) determines the shape of the plant productivity-diversity relationship.

References

{{reflist Biogeography Measurement of biodiversity