Welcome to the Cascadia Bioregion Atlas! This is a collaboratively written living atlas of the Cascadia Bioregion created by GIS Certificate candidates at Western Washington University with guidance by Dr. Aquila Flower. New maps and datasets will be added in future academic years.
A bioregion is a “bio-cultural region” defined by the natural geographic boundaries of ecosystems, watersheds, and human communities, rather than by political boundaries. Bioregions are a powerful concept for organizing regional identities and guiding locally appropriate management decisions. The Cascadia Bioregion encompasses the Columbia and Fraser watersheds, as well as other adjacent watersheds draining into the Pacific Ocean.
Creating maps or conducting spatial analysis for the Cascadia Bioregion or other transboundary international regions is often very challenging because datasets are frequently restricted to a single country, state/province, or other political boundary. Datasets from different sources may not line up spatially or cover the same time period and often use different categories, units, or definitions for the variables they record. Students enrolled in Advanced GIS Applications during Winter 2021 used this challenge as a way to practice the geospatial data management and analysis skills they learned throughout their GIS Certificate classes.
The student authors of this atlas chose a topic they wanted to explore, and were then asked to collect, compile, and edit multiple datasets for that variable to create a single spatially, temporally, and conceptually harmonized dataset covering the whole region; analyze and summarize the harmonized data; and then visualize and interpret their results for a general audience. Each student designed and wrote an interactive web map to contribute to a chapter of the atlas.