岛屿或者“生境岛”中的生物区系常常显示出一种嵌套结构，即物种较贫乏的岛屿中的物种是物种较丰富的岛屿中的物种的一个适当的子集，如果将各个岛屿中的生物区系排列起来就形成一个嵌套的序列。与种-面积关系一样，嵌套结构在很多生境类型和生物类群中也都存在。嵌套性对生物保护也有一定的意义，特别是与SLOSS争论（是单个大的还是几个小的保护区能保护更多的物种）有一定关系。在过去的十几年中，已经提出了一些方法，可以对嵌套性进行定量刻画和统计检验。同时，对嵌套性的形成机制也进行了大量的研究，其中选择性的迁移和选择性的灭绝是两个主要的原因。由于嵌套性分析只需要物种的存在) 不存在数据，使得很多调查数据都能够利用起来，因此，这是一个值得深入研究的领域。
Abstract The biotas of archipelagos and fragmented habitats frequently show a nested structure. That is, the species on depauperate islands represent proper subsets of those on richer islands, and the set of biotas as a whole forms a nested series. Like the species-area relationship, nested structures are observed in many types of habitats and in many taxa. Nestedness has been suggested to have implications for biological conservation, particularly in relation to SLOSS (single large or several small) debate regarding nature reserve design. Several metrics have been proposed to measure nestedness, and several null hypotheses against which to evaluate the nestedness. The causality of nestedness has been investigated in many studies. While nestedness may be influenced by many factors, ultimately it must result from selective immigrations, selective extinctions or both. Because only species presence-absence data are required to perform nestedness analysis so that the data from most inventory programs can be utilized. Thus, this is a field which is worthy for us to do further work.