This area of study is called biogeography.
Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of fossils, various species (plants and animals) and ecosystems throughout geological time and space. Biogeography is also concerned with the factors that are responsible for differences in distribution of species. The three main fields of biogeography are; historical biogeography (involves species distributions from an evolutionary perspective), ecological biogeography (deals with factors that contributes to species distributions) and conservation biogeography.
