Bioregional mapping is the practice of making visible the layers of a living place: its physical geography, ecological relationships, cultural histories, and community networks. It is a community and participatory process that creates maps combining ecological and physical information with social and cultural information within a given place, as defined by those living there or the communities most impacted. Its purpose is to understand a place more fully and care for it more wisely.
Unlike conventional cartography, which primarily represents political boundaries and human infrastructure, bioregional mapping draws from ecology, geology, hydrology, ethnobotany, oral history, Indigenous knowledge, and community organizing. It asks not just where are things? but how do things relate? and what does this place need? It is both a tradition inspired by countless forms of Indigenous mapping stretching back millennia, and a modern practice that has emerged as a direct response to the erasure of local knowledge in the face of ecological, economic, and social crises.
Why Mapping Matters
More than 200 million people use digital mapping applications every day. More than a billion users each month globally. For millions, digital maps have become a primary way of interfacing with the world around them. And yet these maps are not neutral. Maps do not form organically. They are designed and built, constructed with symbols and icons to convey information that someone has chosen to include, to serve their message, mission, and purpose. Who defines these maps, what is included or excluded, and for what purpose, carries powerful implications for how we understand ourselves and our places.
Today, maps have predominantly become tools reserved for governments and economic entities as projections of their own interests. These mapping ecosystems define our interaction with and perception of space, reinforcing ease of use as we move from one destination to another, never pausing to immerse ourselves in the places between. Though we have more geographic information than ever before at our fingertips, we are losing the ability to prioritize and share what matters most about the places we inhabit. If something is not on a map, policymakers, developers, and governments effectively do not see it.
Bioregional mapping reclaims mapmaking for communities and their purposes. It firmly places the control of the map back into the hands of the citizen, the resident, the inhabitant. As Douglas Aberley wrote, mapping is a graphic language we have given away to experts and bureaucracies. Bioregional mapping is an invitation for communities to reclaim it.
How Bioregional Maps Differ
Douglas Aberley and Chief Michael George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation outlined five key distinctions that separate bioregional maps from standard cartographic documents. The maps are made in the community by community members, returning the visual language of mapping to ordinary citizens rather than expert cartographers alone. They combine scientific and traditional information, with each given equal respect. They depict biophysical and cultural information equitably. Each map tells a story in both spatial and descriptive formats. And the maps are living documents, changed and revised as new information is collected.
An essential defining feature is that bioregional maps are not made from one layer of information, but rather as atlases in which layer upon layer has been added, from which shapes and deeper lessons emerge. Beyond a map on a screen or lines on paper, bioregional maps can be stories told around a campfire, sung, danced, quilted, painted, posted, or however best communicates the purpose that participants want to convey.
As a general rule: if you see straight lines on a map, whether dividing a continent, a community, or a commute, it is not a bioregional map.
The Layers of a Living Place
Bioregional maps use layers that together can better represent a place. These generally fall into three broad categories.
Physical layers encompass geology, tectonics, mountains, ridges, valleys, rainfall, wind patterns, and how they change over time. These form the foundation. Geology and plate tectonics serve as the base map, the hard lines: subduction zones, faultlines, underwater hydrology. Their shapes help define the ecoregions and biotic life within them.
Biotic layers describe plants, animals, soils, growing conditions, and how communities of living things interrelate. They capture how species move with the seasons, how ecological communities shift across elevation and latitude, and how non-human life shapes and is shaped by the physical landscape.
Human layers record the lessons of living in place: Indigenous knowledge, culture, economy, history, agriculture, energy production, settlement patterns, and visions for the future. Humans are counted as an integral part of a place's life, as Peter Berg observed, visible in both the ecologically adaptive cultures of early inhabitants and in the activities of present-day reinhabitants who work to harmonize sustainably with the places where they live.
Another essential dimension is temporality. Bioregional maps often include time: how a place changes with each season, how glaciers or fish migrate, how conditions have shifted across generations. They can map past, present, and future, creating roadmaps to the societies and conditions that communities want to build.
Scales of Mapping
Understanding the nested scales within a bioregion is essential for effective mapping. Each scale captures different relationships and requires different approaches.
Watersheds are the smallest unit bioregionalists examine. A watershed is the area from where a raindrop falls or a spring surfaces to the body of water it eventually reaches. Watersheds transcend arbitrary political borders and are critical for understanding where water comes from, where it goes, and how it connects the communities that share it. The Columbia River watershed alone includes parts of six U.S. states and one Canadian province.
Ecoregions are comprised of these watersheds and represent areas with similar types of flora, fauna, geology, soil composition, and rainfall patterns. Ecoregions are larger than a watershed and smaller than a bioregion. There are 75 ecoregions within Cascadia, ranging from roughly 2,000 to over 30,000 square miles.
Bioregions represent the largest sense of scale in which physical connections of place still make sense. They are defined first by geology and tectonics, then by the hydrological systems that emerge, then by the biotic life and human inhabitation within them. Bioregions are the natural countries of the planet. They may contain within them many nations, communities, inhabitants, and ecosystems. We use the natural borders of the bioregion as a base for administrative frameworks because, despite cultural differences, nature acts bioregionally, not anthropocentrically.
Historical Roots
Indigenous communities have been mapping their territories for millennia, with some of the world's earliest maps appearing in cave paintings or preserved in oral traditions. Many Indigenous forms of mapping are inherently bioregional: family and clan relationships, traditional territories and boundaries, relational maps connected to bodies of water, stars, and sky.
In the twentieth century, Indigenous communities began reclaiming contemporary mapping technologies as tools for resistance, resurgence, and education. The Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the Nisga'a, the Tsilhqot'in, and the Wet'suwet'en used bioregional mapping to create some of the first modern bioregional atlases as part of court cases to defend their sovereignty in the 1980s and 1990s.
Instructions for how to map a bioregion were first formalized in Douglas Aberley's Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment, published in 1993. The Salish Sea Community Atlas, coordinated by Sheila Harrington and involving approximately 3,000 participants across 17 islands, demonstrated what community mapping could produce at scale. In her introduction to the atlas project, Harrington wrote that the atlas should be used as a jumping off place for decision making about the future, and that from the holistic image of place that the maps collectively communicate, communities can identify priorities, underutilized potentials, and a proactive plan for positive change.
From Atlas to Action
Bioregional mapping is not an end in itself. The atlas, the map, the story is meant to catalyze action. As Aberley and Chief Michael George wrote, once the bioregional map atlas is completed it becomes the common foundation of knowledge from which planning scenarios can be prepared and decisions ultimately made.
By helping people better know their home, bioregional mapping challenges participants to reconsider how they relate to a place. It breaks down established mental and physical boundaries and, most importantly, inspires care. It is a powerful tool for decolonization, providing a new framework from which to reimagine what society and governance can look like when brought in line with the regenerative carrying capacity of each bioregion.
Peter Berg described the process most simply as three foundational questions: Who am I? Where am I? And what am I going to do about it?
Mapping in Cascadia
Regenerate Cascadia uses bioregional mapping as a core practice within its Landscape Hub Cultivator program. During Phase 2 of the LHC pilot, each of the program's ten landscape groups hosts an in-person bioregional mapping workshop, bringing together people, knowledge, and vision to see their home places as whole living systems. These workshops produce the foundations for landscape-scale regeneration strategies and community-directed finance.
The program's Bioregional Mapping Field Guide for Landscape Stewards provides a comprehensive training-the-trainers manual that covers the philosophy, preparation, and practice of bioregional mapping. It is designed for communities, educators, and organizers who want to deepen their relationship with the living places they call home.
Bioregionalism is about bringing that which has been separated back together. We do not surrender affiliations to other causes, we simply share an understanding that our actions bear most fruit when interrelated in an ecologically, and culturally, defined place.
Douglas Aberley