Introducing The Local Watersheds Project
What is the Local Watersheds Project?
At face value, Local Watersheds (LW) is a web-based system where any person on the planet can geolocate themselves within their current watershed boundary, wherever they may be at the time. They can then access curated information about the watershed.
At its core, LW is a tool for understanding bioregions and bioregionalism: bioregional learning, planning, building.
Quick tip: If you’re in a big hurry, feel free to go ahead and support the Local Watersheds project through our Givebutter campaign.
Watersheds as Bioregions
In Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World, David Orr introduces us to the concept of bioregional catalogs:
“The rejuvenation of local economies will also require the development of different forms of technology…They share common traits of being smaller in scale, generally based on renewable energy, relatively less expensive, widely dispersed, locally owned and controlled, and environmentally benign. The discussion of alternative technology, pro and con, has tended to focus too much on tools and too little on materials and bioregionally appropriate designs and procedures that reduce the need for expensive and destructive technologies. Pliny Fiske in Austin, Texas has developed a catalog of bioregionally available and cost-competitive building materials, such as caliche and mesquite. Similar inventories need to be done elsewhere as an alternative to importing expensive environmentally damaging materials. We need similar catalogs of bioregionally appropriate methods of forestry, land management, and agriculture that minimize the need for energy and high technology.” (p. 74-75)
Orr, D. W. (1991). Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. (n.p.): State University of New York Press.
As such, LW is an interactive global atlas accessing nested networks of watersheds as bioregions, identifying inventories of local, renewable, sustainable materials and services as bioregional catalogs in service of local communities and economies within limits. LW is a tool for local communities to build, curate, and update bioregional catalogs for their watersheds, and to share these catalogs with the world, in service of bioregional learning, planning, building, and stewardship.
Potential Uses of the Local Watersheds Application
Beyond simply cataloging inventories of watersheds, we foresee a variety of potential uses for LW, including teaching and learning, research, presentation, and planning.
- Use LW as an exploratory learning tool, perusing maps, etc.
- Use LW to conduct ecosocial research about one or more watersheds/bioregions
- Use LW to collect evidence for a public or private argument, presentation, or discussion (such as a town hall meeting)
- Use LW as a tool for bioregional planning to build a bioregional community.
Let’s take a brief look at how LW could be used for bioregional learning, planning, and building. (These elements of usage for LW are derived heavily from the work of Robert Thayer, which he presents in his book LifePlace.)
Bioregional Learning
Elements of bioregional learning include mapping, spatial analysis, and regional geography, regional geology and climate, bioregional flora and fauna, hydrology and watershed analysis, water resource management, landscape ecology and restoration. To be more specific, consider mapping and restoration.
Mapping and Geography
Mapping, spatial analysis, and regional geography: People would use LW to “study the local bioregion from a hierarchical physiographic perspective, learning mapping skills, studying geographic principles, and gradually focusing closer and closer on the home place.” (Thayer, R. L., 2003)
Ecology, Stewardship, and Restoration
Landscape ecology and restoration: People would use LW to “study the dynamic spatial patterns and distributions of species within the bioregion, learning to identify, protect, and restore the critical habitats, corridors, and networks upon which the ecological integrity of the region depends.” (Thayer, R. L., 2003)
Bioregional Planning
Thayer gives a brief introduction to bioregional planning (as compared to traditional planning practices) in LifePlace:
“the trends in such processes are toward increased respect for the limits and potentials of the region; reduction in the scale of physical intervention; a finer-grained, more regional self-sufficiency; ever-broadening grassroots constituency and public support; more incorporation of local wisdom from long-term residents and those intending to stay; intersection of sustainability goals and regionally distinct characteristics; and adaptation to different scales and different situations with similar, but not necessarily identical, outcomes or results.” (p. 173)
Thayer, R. L. (2003). LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Ukraine: University of California Press.
Within this context, let’s consider four types of planning activities where people might find LW to be a useful set of tools: mapping, monitoring, indexing, and footprinting.
Mapping
One technique is to seek and record all mappable information about the bioregion. In this fashion, maps become social research and action tools whose value is at least as great as that of the single-resource data layers (e.g. soils, hydrology, vegetation, slope) typical of top-down ecological planning.
Monitoring
Monitoring of ecosystem conditions is another important bioregional planning tool: monitoring of water quality and quantity, wildlife and fish populations, recreational or transit use, climate conditions, and the like.
Indexing
Indexing involves focusing on a physical parameter such as water, energy, or food; thus an analyst can determine how much is produced within a given region versus how much is consumed. Resulting ratios can be used to gauge relative self-sufficiency versus dependency on external supplies. Periodic measurement of these benchmarks allows relative progress toward or away from desired sustainable conditions to be determined.
Footprinting
Ecological footprinting is where someone calculates the land-equivalent areas needed for sustainable production of life needs, such as water, energy, food, or wood. This is a process conceptualized by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, among others.
Bioregional Building
Beyond planning, there is bioregional building, which entails executing the elements within a bioregional plan, in a sense.
There are three major areas of bioregional building:
- Biodiversity Framework
- Agricultural Heart
- Regenerative Communities and Infrastructure
Below are some examples of building activities that could take place in each of these three areas, using LW as a toolset while conducting these activities.
Biodiversity Framework
Living corridors
Protect what remains of natural river, stream, and slough corridors and enhance their capacity to provide habitat for biodiversity, species mobility, water quality, erosion control, flood control, and amenity values for both private landowners and the public.
Whole watersheds
Plan for and manage whole watersheds from headwaters to confluence or outflow.
Conservation areas
Define joint public-private natural areas and manage them as quilts of conservation.
Agricultural Heart
Farmland preservation
Identify and preserve in perpetuity the best farmlands in the valley and mitigate the loss of agricultural land by preserving a great deal more of it than is developed.
“Foodshed”
Consider the bioregion as a “foodshed” and support local consumption of locally produced foods.
Expanded farming role
Find ways to pay farmers for the ecological cultural and stewardship services they provide. This is where the “food not lawns” idea may also fit in.
Regenerative Communities and Infrastructure
Compact cities and towns
Grow cities and towns inward and upward, not outward. Locate “new” development on “old” sites.
New village centers
Redesign aging shopping centers as dense vertically integrated mixed land use centers containing commercial shops, offices, recreation, civic amenities, residential buildings.
Regenerative transit
Provide multimodal bus-bicycle-rail transit using fees extracted from the real costs of automobile sprawl.
Local Energy
Generate energy as locally as possible, at appropriate scales. Avoid transmission loss at all costs.
An Open Educational Focus
Our intention for Local Watersheds for all the platform tools to serve as an open educational resource that will be registered as an OER Hub through OER Commons.
Hopefully, you’re already beginning to think about how you could use a toolset like Local Watersheds to conduct your own bioregional learning, planning, and building!
What’s the Real Purpose of Local Watersheds?
We’re creating LW to provide people with a global local toolset for bioregional planning, teaching, and learning, made available as open educational resources (OER). The motivation is to foster ecological literacy, systems wisdom, and ecocentric mindsets, as well as bioregional perspectives, stewardship, and engagement through the planning, teaching and learning uses of this toolset.
What does success for Local Watersheds look like?
Success for LW means that users around the biosphere are accessing and contributing high quality information elements to the database inventory with increasing frequency, and that teaching, learning, and building/planning activities using LW tools are happening with increasing frequency and regularity throughout the biosphere. Success means that more bioregional communities are defined and cultivated across the biosphere.
Intended Impact of Local Watersheds
Who are the “targeted audiences” of Local Watersheds?
At full capacity, Local Watersheds should serve all humans in the biosphere, in service of all living beings.
As a pilot, in the Upper New River basin/watershed/bioregion, there are approximately 350,000 humans. This audience is our alpha target.
The nine neighboring basins (Middle New, Upper James, Upper Roanoke, Upper Dan, Upper Yadkin, Upper Catawba, Watauga, South Fork Holston, North Fork Holston) contain a much larger population of humans (including parts of the Charlotte Metropolitan area). This audience is our beta target.
The United States (340 million), Canada (41 million), and Mexico (131 million) will be included in our North American outreach campaign. This is an audience of ~512 million humans.
One of the questions we were asked about Local Watersheds is: What is the estimated number of lives impacted by this project once it is fully deployed?
As we mentioned above: a successful North American outreach campaign includes an audience of ~512M humans, and a ten percent return on this campaign means impacting the lives of 5 million humans. As this is a global project in service of all humans in the biosphere, if we are to define “fully deployed” for the LW project, this would mean that all humans have access to the LW platform (regardless of frequency of use).
So, when fully deployed, we would hope for Local Watersheds to impact billions of human lives.
We’re not stopping with humans. The idea is to impact the lives of all species with which we humans share the biosphere, as a result of increased ecological literacy, ecocentric mindsets, and bioregional stewardship achieved by humans in service of our biospherical community members.
A foundational purpose of Local Watersheds, and of bioregionalism in general, is to take on ecocentric mindsets to move beyond anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, which is also called human exceptionalism or human supremacism.
Local Watersheds should help us all understand that we share the biosphere with all living beings, and LW can help us to take the steps necessary to reorient our existences to share this space from the perspective of interspecific ecological justice.
Who will be the primary users of Local Watersheds?
Primary users of LW would include contributors, groundtruthers, administrators, learners, teachers, researchers, planners, presenters, and journalists.
Primary use cases would include teaching, learning, research projects, bioregional planning, evidence-based arguments, articles, white papers, demos, presentations, and public discussions.
Happening Next: Develop For Good
Here’s the really good news about Local Watersheds: we’re already getting serious traction! The Upper New has been accepted to join Develop for Good’s upcoming Winter 2026 project batch.
Our cohort runs from October 27, 2025 to February 21, 2026. Develop for Good has assembled a volunteer team of undergraduate students to work on a web application design for Local Watersheds.
In their communications with us, Develop for Good informed us that the student team’s work “may include user research, information architecture, visual design mockups, interactive prototypes, and recommendations for implementation platforms. The deliverable will be design documentation that your technical contractors can use to guide actual development.”
Develop for Good also emphasized their excitement about us taking an innovative approach to ecological education, and look forward to working with you!
More about Develop For Good
Develop For Good is a recent phenomenon, hatched during the COVID pandemic, when universities sent millions of students home, and internship and employment opportunities essentially vanished overnight:
“Spurred by the critical needs of both students looking for work and nonprofits seeking digital support, Computer Science students at Stanford created Develop for Good. We support diverse college students as they build software for nonprofits under industry mentorship. Our mission is to ensure every college student has the opportunity to gain real-world, high-impact tech experience, all while creating meaningful solutions for the nonprofit sector.”
Develop For Good: https://www.developforgood.org/about-us
Here Develop For Good explains a bit more about their “cohort” approach to design work.
“We offer 16-week batches of custom, made-to-order services, which can include a combination of our sprint types depending on the scope of your needs and what a project team can achieve in this timeframe. Each project team consists of the following members: 1 student Product Manager, 1 student Design or Technical Manager, 4-6 Designers and/or Engineers, up to 1 Team Mentor based on availability, and additional 1:1 Mentors based on availability. Together, the members of a team will dedicate ~800 hours of technical work…”
Develop For Good: https://www.developforgood.org/for-nonprofits
Develop for Good provides example case studies of previous work, and here we take the opportunity to highlight two previous projects we find quite impressive: Readeezy and Falling Fruit. Readeezy worked with Develop For Good to begin bringing a digital library for struggling readers to smartphones, and the Falling Fruit project focused on using ML (machine learning) to provide time-series predictions for plant ripeness.
Support Local Watersheds!
If you think this Local Watersheds project is a great idea, there is already a great way for you to help The Upper New get the project up and running: you can support the project through our Givebutter Campaign.
We’re raising $5000 to extend the design and development “runway” for The Local Watersheds Project.
This includes supporting our in-house efforts to develop an “alpha” prototype database and application that can be tested locally in the Upper New River basin (05050001) and our nine neighboring basins, such as the Upper Yadkin (03040101) and Watauga (06010103) basins.
Please consider supporting our work today. Thank you!