What is the Local Watersheds project?
Local Watersheds is a web-based application where any person on the planet can geolocate themselves within their current (sub-)watershed boundary, wherever they may be at the time. They can then access curated information about the watershed.
Watersheds make excellent boundaries for bioregions: based on gravity and water flow, existing as long as water has flowed on land surfaces on planet earth. Geologically and geographically, watershed boundaries are significantly more permanent than those drawn by humans.
At its core, Local Watersheds is a tool for understanding bioregions and bioregionalism: bioregional learning, planning, and building.
Local Watersheds = Bioregional Catalogs
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.”
David Orr, Ecological Literacy (p. 74-75(
As such, Local Watersheds 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.
Local Watersheds 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.
You can read more about bioregionalism on the Upper New website.
We all have Local Watersheds
We all live and work and play in multiple watersheds, and we share these watersheds with all other living beings. We all live upstream and downstream from other people and all other species in the biosphere.
Below is a map of the watersheds where we are, here at the Upper New (host of the Local Watersheds project), as well as all our neighboring basins. One of the interesting things about living and working in the Upper New is that we are the headwaters of one of the oldest rivers in the world, and most of our neighboring basins are also headwaters (see all the “Upper” names?).
Notice all the HUC 10s (watersheds) and HUC 12s (sub-watersheds) nestled within each of these bioregions. Think of the bioregional catalogs for these ten bioregions alone, much less the rest of Turtle Island (a.k.a North America)!
If you’re viewing this on a device that can detect your location, think about locating yourself within the map! (You can use the little arrow down at the bottom right corner of the map.)
Prototyping Local Watersheds
As a functioning machine, Local Watersheds is still in the conceptual stages. Throughout 2026, here’s what we’re hoping to do.
Field Data Collection Protocols
We’re currently hosting an epicollect5 project to allow us to quickly and easily field test mobile data collection (and online data management) at a global scale. As volunteers all over the world use the epicollect5 mobile app to gather geolocated data and upload it to our project database, we can quickly map out these data, curate them, and pull them into our own systems to map watershed-centric results to understand how to better host data collection tools for bioregional learning, planning, and building.
The mobile app works on Android and iOS devices, and can be used offline with data sync over wi-fi when available. Below are several screenshots of the Local Watersheds field data collection shown on an Android smartphone.
epicollect5 makes it really easy to tweak the data collection form items and workflows and immediately update forms on participants’ mobile devices the next time they open the app. This makes it very easy for the Local Watersheds team to iterate through several designs of data collection to improve the process as we move to the next phases of design and development.
If you’re interested in participating in the Local Watersheds project as a data collection volunteer, please sign up here!
Watersheds (Bioregion) Boundary Markers
We want to help people understand where their bioregions (full of local watersheds!) really are, and where their bioregional neighborhoods bump into each other. These are the physical boundaries for the USGS HUC 08 sub-basins, which we equate with the boundaries of bioregions across the continent.
For the Upper New bioregion, we’ve begun the process of mapping intersections (mostly on foot and in vehicles) where established paths cross between bioregions (or come upon the edge of two bioregions at a terminus). At each intersection on the map, we intend to inform travelers which bioregions they are entering and leaving in each direction.
Ideally, we’ll get to the point where we have physical signage (hybridized with QR codes) at each of these boundary intersections (such as where the Appalachian trail crosses between bioregions). In the meantime, we’ve mapped it digitally, and we intend to publish a more nuanced version as an open educational resource (OER) that people can download and install on their own personal mapping systems (like GaiaGPS).
For now, you can play around with it in our interactive map.
Where are we headed with Local Watersheds?
As we continue prototyping with epicollect5 into 2026, we’re also working quickly to design and develop an MVP, or minimally viable product, that we can launch as a truly cross-platform geolocated cataloging application for bioregional learning, planning, and building.
The Local Watersheds MVP will be available as a browser-based web application, a native mobile application that can be installed on iOS or Android devices through the App Store or Google Play, and a desktop application available for Mac OS or Windows.
Anyone anywhere in the world will be able to engage with Local Watersheds for free, as long as they have a way to register for a Local Watersheds account.
Our ambitious goal is to have a “ready for primetime” MVP shipped by the third quarter of 2026.
The end purpose of Local Watersheds is to serve as nothing less than a “Library of Congress” for the entire biosphere: a global platform for multigenerational bioregional learning, planning, and building – in service of continental conservation, ecocentric stewardship, and interspecific ecological justice.
