1. Areas that contain ecologically distinct biological content, called bioregions, are a central component to spatial and ecosystem‐based management. We review and describe a variety of commonly used and newly developed statistical approaches for quantitatively determining bioregions.
2. Statistical approaches to bioregionalization can broadly be classified as two‐stage approaches that either ‘Group First, then Predict’ or ‘Predict First, then Group’, or a newer class of one‐stage approaches that simultaneously analyse biological data with reference to environmental data to generate bioregions. We demonstrate these approaches using a selection of methods applied to simulated data and real data on demersal fish. The methods are assessed against their ability to answer several common scientific or management questions.
3. The true number of simulated bioregions was only identified by both of the one‐stage methods and one two‐stage method. When the number of bioregions was known, many of the methods, but not all, could adequately infer the species, environmental and spatial characteristics of bioregions. One‐stage approaches, however, do so directly via a single model without the need for separate post‐hoc analyses and additionally provide an appropriate characterization of uncertainty.
4. One‐stage approaches provide a comprehensive and consistent method for objectively identifying and characterizing bioregions using both biological and environmental data. Potential avenues of future development in one‐stage methods include incorporating presence‐only and multiple data types as well as considering functional aspects of bioregions.

中文翻译：

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确定海洋生物区域：定量方法的比较

1. 包含生态上独特的生物成分的区域称为生物区域，是基于空间和基于生态系统的管理的重要组成部分。我们审查并描述了各种常用和新近开发的统计方法，用于定量确定生物区域。
2. 生物分区的统计方法可以大致分为“第一组，然后是预测”或“第一组，然后是组”的两阶段方法，或者是同时参考环境数据分析生物数据的新型一阶段方法。产生生物区域。我们使用选择的方法演示了这些方法，这些方法适用于沉鱼的模拟数据和真实数据。针对这些方法回答几种常见科学或管理问题的能力进行了评估。
3. 只能通过一阶段方法和一两阶段方法来识别模拟的生物区域的真实数量。当已知生物区域的数量时，许多方法（但不是全部）可以充分推断出生物区域的物种，环境和空间特征。但是，单阶段方法可以直接通过单个模型执行此操作，而无需单独进行事后分析，并且可以提供不确定性的适当表征。
4. 分阶段方法为使用生物学和环境数据客观地识别和表征生物区域提供了一种全面一致的方法。一阶段方法未来发展的潜在途径包括合并仅存在和多种数据类型，以及考虑生物区域的功能方面。