Exploring patterns of beta-diversity to test the consistency of biogeographical boundaries: A case study across forest plant communities of Italy.

Our findings confirm a biogeographical structure of the species pools that is captured by the biogeographical regionalization. However, nonsignificant differences between the Mediterranean and Continental biogeographical regions suggest that this biogeographical regionalization is not consistent for forest plant communities. Our results demonstrate that an analytical evaluation of species composition differences among regions using beta-diversity analysis is a promising approach for testing the consistency of biogeographical regionalization models. This approach is recommended to provide support to the biogeographical regionalization used in some environmental conservation polices adopted by EU.