Land Selection Framework
A bioregioning tool for communities seeking to belong to a place — and help it flourish over fifty to a hundred years.
Bioregioning means living within the grain of a place — its watersheds, its soils, its seasons, and the diversity and coherence of the living whole — in good faith with the people and lifeways already rooted there. That relationship is the whole premise, not an afterthought. The tool reads eight criteria, with sources, across thirty regions in Europe and North America, as questions about how a community might arrive in reciprocity and help a place flourish over generations. You set the thresholds; it filters, and never scores, ranks, or tells you where to go.
This is what we hope the tool can support — and we're glad to talk it through with anyone weighing where to put down roots.
A place is not a product. Arriving is a relationship.
This tool helps you see where a community could put down roots and regenerate a place over generations. It never tells you to go anywhere. Every region here is already someone's home — held in living communities with their own histories, lifeways, and care for the land. Reading a place well means asking what arriving would ask of you, and listening for the answer.
People before land. Still choosing where before you have the people you'd do this with? Find your community first
How to arriveFor people already here
Part of Regen Community Tools · free tools for forming community · pass this framework to a group weighing where to root · telegram · whatsapp.
A hundred years is longer than any dataset here.
The horizon this tool cares about is fifty to a hundred years. Every criterion below is read from a window of past or projected data, drawn against that horizon, and the tool dates every number it shows. It leaves the long view to you, and to the people who already live there.
Six of eight criteria describe the past or the present. The furthest any of them looks is 2060, a projection. The tool reads what it can, and says plainly where it cannot see.
What matters most for where you'd put down roots?
This is a bioregioning tool for communities hoping to belong to a place — and help it flourish — over fifty to a hundred years. Tap a starting point and the sliders set themselves, or move any slider to filter thirty regions by what matters to you. Every number names its source. Nothing is scored, ranked, or recommended — and wherever you land, arriving in good faith with who's already there comes with it.
Starting points, not recommendations. They move sliders; they compose nothing.
Thirty regions, briefly named.
Illustrative, chosen because each tells a different story across the criteria. The map carries twenty-three data layers across six themes, each drawn from a public service (WorldClim, WRI Aqueduct, SoilGrids, Global Solar Atlas, NASA, GEM, Global Forest Watch, and more). Toggle any layer on; stack a couple to compare. Two context layers, the bioregion outlines and major rivers, sit beside them in the same panel.
The eight criteria, region by region.
Each card is one criterion from the framework. Drag the threshold to filter, regions that meet your criterion stay highlighted; others fade. The framework filters, it never scores.
New here? Start with a scenario, then adjust the sliders to taste. These are starting points, not recommendations.
Everything together.
Every criterion for every region on this continent, in one table and in the order of the slate. Read down a column to see one place; read across a row to see one criterion. A region outside your thresholds is shaded as a whole column. Nothing is added up.
Scroll sideways to read every column.
Read further.
If you want to understand how the framework thinks, why it filters and never scores, how land standing is read, and what the group has deliberately left open, the deeper page sets it out.
Read the deeper material: the methodology, the regional case studies, the ethics and values, and the design tensions deferred to V2.