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Find Your Bioregion

The first step in bioregionalism is simple: know where you are.

Not your address. Not your state. Your watershed. Your soil. Your native plant community. The range of the species that have always lived here. These are the real coordinates of your place on Earth.

Start Here: The Watershed

Every bioregion is organized around water. Find your watershed first.

A watershed is all the land that drains into a common river or body of water. The rain that falls on your roof runs to a storm drain, which runs to a creek, which runs to a river, which runs to a larger river, which eventually reaches the sea (or an inland basin). That whole drainage area — from ridge to ridge — is your watershed.

To find yours:

Once you know your watershed, find out: - Is it a tributary of a major river? Which one? - What's the water quality status of your local streams? - Where does your drinking water come from?

The "Where You At?" Quiz

In 1981, environmental educators Peter Berg, Beryl Magilavy, and Seth Zuckerman published a quiz in CoEvolution Quarterly called "Where You At?" — a set of questions designed to measure how well you actually know where you live.

It became one of the founding documents of the bioregionalism movement. The questions below are adapted from that original quiz.

Try to answer these without looking anything up first. Then look up the ones you couldn't answer. That process — noticing what you don't know, then learning it — is itself a form of reinhabitation.

The Quiz

Water

  1. Trace the water you drink, from rainfall to your tap.
  2. What is the name of the creek or river closest to your home? Where does it go?
  3. What is the total annual rainfall in your area? In drought years? In flood years?
  4. When was the last time a serious flood affected your watershed?

Land

  1. What soil series are you standing on? What was it before it was farmed or paved? (USDA Web Soil Survey can answer this.)
  2. What was the dominant vegetation of your area before European settlement?
  3. Name five native plants in your region and the seasons in which they're available.
  4. How long is the growing season where you live?

Living Things

  1. Name five birds that live in your area year-round. Name five that migrate through or winter here.
  2. What wild mammals live in your watershed? Which ones were extirpated — locally eliminated — and which have returned?
  3. What is the most dangerous native plant in your region? The most medicinally important?
  4. What species have gone extinct in your area in the last 200 years?

History

  1. What Indigenous nation or nations lived on the land where you now live? What happened to them?
  2. What is the land use history of your neighborhood — what was it before it was what it is now?
  3. What is the primary ecological event or process that shaped the landform where you live? (Glaciation? Fire? Flooding? Volcanic activity? Sea-level change?)

Governance

  1. What county, watershed district, and air quality management district govern your area?
  2. Where does your trash go?
  3. Where does your sewage go, and where does the treated water end up?
  4. What energy sources power your home, and where do they come from?

There are no grades. The point is not to feel bad about what you don't know — it's to become curious about it.

Peter Berg's phrase for the process of answering these questions over time was reinhabitation: learning to live in your place as if you intended to stay.

Know Whose Land You're On

Before European colonization, North America was a mosaic of Indigenous nations, each with a relationship to the land developed over thousands of years. Their territories often followed ecological boundaries — rivers, mountain ranges, biomes — in ways that overlap significantly with bioregional boundaries.

  • Native Land Digital — interactive map of Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties across North America and the world
  • Whose Land — land acknowledgment tool and territorial resource

A bioregional relationship with your place that ignores its Indigenous history is incomplete. The nations who lived here for millennia understood its ecology — often better than current science does.

Find Your Native Plants

Knowing the native plant community of your region is one of the most powerful forms of ecological literacy available.

Bioregional Maps

Several overlapping frameworks divide North America into ecological regions. None is authoritative — bioregions don't have sharp edges, and different frameworks emphasize different ecological factors.

  • Ecoregions (EPA) — the most commonly used official framework; four levels of increasing specificity from continental to local. EPA Ecoregions
  • Omernik Ecoregions — an alternative framework from USGS that emphasizes vegetation and land use patterns
  • Biomes — the largest-scale categories (temperate rainforest, shortgrass prairie, etc.), useful as a first orientation
  • Watershed HUC codes — the USGS Hydrologic Unit Code system divides the U.S. into 2,100+ watersheds at increasing levels of resolution; every creek has a code

The bioregions covered on this site use a loose combination of watershed, biome, and cultural/historical factors — which is how most bioregionalists actually think about regions. There's no one right answer.

What to Do Next

Once you have a sense of your bioregion:

  1. Learn the water. Walk your local creek or river. Find out its water quality status and who monitors it.
  2. Learn a plant. Pick one native plant and learn its whole story — where it grows, when it flowers, what eats it, what it was used for.
  3. Find the people. Most bioregions have watershed councils, native plant societies, birding groups, and land trusts. These are the practical institutions of bioregional life.
  4. Look at the map differently. When you see a political map of your state, notice the rivers and ridges underneath it. Notice what the political boundaries ignore.

The goal is not to become an expert. The goal is to become a neighbor.