# A Bioregional Glossary

By [BSL](https://www.bioregionalsystemslab.org/)

#### **A working vocabulary for bioregional practice.**

Terms used across systems thinking, commons governance, ecological design, regenerative economics, indigenous territorial governance, and the broader field that practitioners encounter in their work.

<details>

<summary><mark style="color:$primary;"><strong>About the glossary</strong></mark></summary>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Scope.**</mark> What the glossary covers and what it does not. Around 100 terms at v1, weighted toward field-foundational and cross-disciplinary terms, with BSL framework terms where they offer perspective the field may find useful.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Navigation and cross-references.**</mark> Letter rail for jumping. Search for finding specific terms. Cross-references at the end of related entries link conceptual neighborhoods.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Attribution.**</mark> Terms from established traditions include brief attribution in parentheses. Terms developed within Bioregional Systems Lab are marked.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Contested terms.**</mark> Some terms have genuinely contested definitions. These entries name the contestation and offer the precise usage alongside the looser one.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Contributing.**</mark> Member contributions are integrated into subsequent versions with attribution. Pathway for submission.

</details>

> *A living reference, evolving with the field.*

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**A**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Adaptive capacity**</mark>\
The ability of a system to maintain function and transform itself while undergoing change.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Adaptive by Design**</mark>\
A design principle that builds frameworks as flexible scaffolds with stable structural commitments and adaptive content, allowing context-specific configuration without losing coherence.\ <sub>*<mark style="color:$info;">Bioregional Systems Lab</mark>*</sub>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Agency**</mark>\
The capacity to act with intention within a given context, operating at individual, community, institutional, and bioregional scales.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Allopoiesis**</mark>\
The property of producing outputs separate from oneself, as industrial systems do, in contrast to autopoiesis.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Anthropocene**</mark>\
A proposed geological epoch defined by significant human influence on Earth's geology, ecosystems, and climate.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Antifragility**</mark>\
The property of systems that improve through stress and disorder rather than merely resisting it.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Attractor**</mark>\
A pattern or state that a system tends toward over time. In complex systems, attractors describe the deep behavioral patterns beneath surface variability.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Autopoiesis**</mark>\
The property by which a living system continuously produces and maintains itself through its own internal organization.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**B**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Backcasting**</mark>\
A planning method that starts from a desired future state and works backward to identify the conditions and pathways that would lead to it.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Biocultural**</mark>\
The interwoven relationship between biological and cultural diversity. Recognizes that ecosystems and human cultures coevolve and that one cannot be sustained without the other.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Biodiversity**</mark>\
The variety of life across genes, species, and ecosystems within a given area. A measure of ecological richness and a key indicator of system health.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Biome**</mark>\
A large ecological community defined by climate, vegetation, and characteristic species, such as temperate forest, grassland, or tropical rainforest.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Bioregion**</mark>\
A territorially coherent area defined by ecological boundaries such as watersheds, biotic communities, and climatic systems, rather than political ones.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Bioregional coordination**</mark>\
The practice of coordinating human activity at bioregional scale, integrating ecological, social, economic, and cultural dimensions through governance that matches ecological logic.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Bioregionalism**</mark>\
A philosophical and political movement advocating governance, economy, and culture organized around ecological boundaries rather than political ones.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Bioregional Metabolism**</mark>\
The continuous metabolic circuit through which a bioregion senses, orchestrates, acts, and learns, treating coordination as living-system function rather than process management.\ <sub>*<mark style="color:$info;">Bioregional Systems Lab</mark>*</sub>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Boundary**</mark>\
The edge of a system that defines what is inside and what is outside. In ecology, boundaries are often gradients rather than sharp lines. In governance, boundary choice shapes what gets coordinated.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**C**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Carrying capacity**</mark>\
The maximum population or activity level that a given ecosystem can sustain without degradation.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Climate adaptation**</mark>\
The practice of adjusting human and ecological systems to actual or anticipated climate change and its effects.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Coevolution**</mark>\
The reciprocal evolutionary change between two or more species, or between species and their environments, through ongoing interaction.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Coherence**</mark>\
The state of internal alignment in a system, where parts work together toward shared direction without contradiction. Distinct from uniformity, which removes difference; coherence holds difference in productive relationship.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Coherence Geometry**</mark>\
A diagnostic framework for reading the health of a coordinating system across four axes: internal coherence, horizontal coherence, vertical coherence, and temporal coherence.\ <sub>*<mark style="color:$info;">Bioregional Systems Lab</mark>*</sub>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Collective intelligence**</mark>\
The shared knowing that emerges when individuals, groups, and information systems combine perception, reasoning, and learning capacity.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Commons**</mark>\
A resource, system, or domain held and stewarded collectively rather than owned privately or controlled by the state. Commons require active governance and clear protocols to function well.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Common-pool resource**</mark>\
A resource where use by one party reduces availability for others, but exclusion of users is difficult. Water systems, fisheries, and grazing lands are classic examples.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Community of practice**</mark>\
A group of practitioners who develop shared expertise, language, and methods through ongoing engagement with a common domain of work.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Complexity**</mark>\
The property of systems with many interacting components whose collective behavior cannot be predicted from the behavior of individual parts alone.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Complex adaptive system**</mark>\
A system composed of many interacting agents that learn, adapt, and produce emergent patterns through their interactions. Bioregions are complex adaptive systems.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Coordination**</mark>\
The alignment of actions across actors toward shared purpose. Distinct from cooperation (which is transactional) and resonance (which is emergent).

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Cybernetic**</mark>\
Relating to communication, feedback, and control in living and designed systems. A cybernetic system continuously senses its state and adjusts its behavior based on feedback.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Cybernetic loop**</mark>\
A continuous feedback circuit in which a system senses its environment, responds, and updates its sensing based on results. Foundational to how living systems maintain themselves.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**D**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Decentralization**</mark>\
The distribution of authority, capability, or function across multiple nodes rather than concentrating it in a central point.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Deep time**</mark>\
A perspective on time that considers geological, evolutionary, and intergenerational timescales rather than only human institutional ones.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Distributed governance**</mark>\
A governance pattern in which decision-making authority is spread across multiple nodes operating with coordinated autonomy rather than under centralized control.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Diversity**</mark>\
The presence of variety within a system. In ecology, the range of species and genetic material. In social systems, the range of perspectives, capacities, and relational patterns. A condition for resilience.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Domain**</mark>\
A defined area of work, knowledge, or coordination. In framework architecture, a domain is a structural unit that holds a specific function or capability within a larger system.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Doughnut economics**</mark>\
An economic framework defining a safe and just operating space between an inner social foundation and an outer ecological ceiling, beyond which human activity becomes unsustainable.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Drawdown**</mark>\
The reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations through ecological and technological means. Often used in climate work as the threshold goal for stabilizing climate.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Dynamics**</mark>\
The patterns of change and interaction within a system over time. Studying dynamics means looking at how a system behaves, not just what it contains.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**E**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ecological economics**</mark>\
An economic approach that treats the economy as a subsystem of the biosphere, bounded by ecological limits and dependent on natural processes.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ecological footprint**</mark>\
A measure of the demand human activity places on ecosystems, expressed as the area of biologically productive land and water required to sustain that activity.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ecological literacy**</mark>\
The ability to understand the natural systems that make life on Earth possible and to apply that understanding to how human systems are designed.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ecology**</mark>\
The study of relationships between living organisms and their environments. Also used more broadly to describe the relational fabric of any system.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ecosystem**</mark>\
A community of living organisms interacting with the non-living components of their environment as a functional unit.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ecosystem services**</mark>\
The benefits that ecosystems provide to human and other life, including provisioning (food, water), regulating (climate, flooding), supporting (soil, nutrient cycling), and cultural functions.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Edge effect**</mark>\
The ecological dynamics that occur at the boundary between two ecosystems, often producing greater diversity and activity than either system alone.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Embeddedness**</mark>\
The condition of being situated within a larger context that shapes possibilities and constraints. Economies are embedded in societies; societies are embedded in ecosystems.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Emergence**</mark>\
The arising of novel properties, patterns, or behaviors from the interactions of system components, where the whole exhibits qualities not present in any individual part.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Enabling constraints**</mark>\
Rules or structures that shape behavior toward generative outcomes without specifying exact actions. Enabling constraints guide without controlling.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Epistemology**</mark>\
The study of how knowledge is produced, validated, and known. In bioregional practice, multiple epistemologies operate together: scientific, situated, indigenous, relational.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Externalities**</mark>\
Costs or benefits of an activity that fall on parties not directly involved in it. Negative externalities (pollution, depletion) are central to ecological economics.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**F**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Feedback loop**</mark>\
A circular causal pattern in which the output of a system influences its input. Reinforcing loops amplify change; balancing loops stabilize toward equilibrium.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Field**</mark>\
A domain of practice, knowledge, or activity recognized as coherent by those working within it. A field has shared language, methods, and contested questions, even when it lacks formal institutional boundaries.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Fitness**</mark>\
In evolutionary terms, the ability of an organism or system to survive and reproduce in its environment. Applied more broadly to the alignment between a system and its context.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Flow**</mark>\
The movement of resources, information, energy, or value through a system. Healthy systems sustain flows; blocked or extractive flows produce degradation.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Food sovereignty**</mark>\
The right of peoples and communities to define their own food and agricultural systems, prioritizing local production, ecological methods, and cultural appropriateness over market-driven export models.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Foresight**</mark>\
The disciplined practice of thinking systematically about the future to inform present decisions. Distinct from prediction; foresight maps possibilities, not certainties.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Fractal**</mark>\
A pattern that repeats at different scales. In coordination systems, a fractal architecture is one where the same structural pattern operates at community, watershed, bioregional, and inter-bioregional scales.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Framework**</mark>\
A structured set of concepts, methods, and principles that organizes thinking and practice within a domain. Frameworks make tacit knowledge explicit and shareable.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC)**</mark>\
A right of indigenous peoples to give or withhold consent for activities affecting their lands, territories, and resources. A foundational principle of indigenous-respecting governance.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**G**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Generative**</mark>\
Producing new capacity, possibility, or life. Distinguished from extractive (which depletes) and even regenerative (which restores); generative work creates what did not exist before.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Genius loci**</mark>\
The distinctive character of a place, its spirit. Used in design and ecology to describe the qualities that make a particular bioregion or site what it is.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Governance**</mark>\
The systems, processes, and protocols by which collective decisions are made and authority is exercised. Distinct from government, which is one form governance can take.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Great Transition**</mark>\
A widely used term for the civilizational shift from extractive industrial systems toward ecologically and socially sustainable ones. The destination is contested; the necessity of transition is broadly recognized.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Green infrastructure**</mark>\
A network of natural and semi-natural systems that provide ecological services to human settlements, such as urban forests, wetlands, and watershed protection zones.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Ground truth**</mark>\
Direct, situated knowledge of conditions in a specific place, as distinct from remote, abstract, or modeled knowledge. Bioregional practice depends on ground truth alongside other knowledge streams.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**H**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Habitat**</mark>\
The environmental conditions and ecological community that support a given species or population.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Holistic**</mark>\
Approaching a system as an integrated whole rather than as the sum of separate parts. Holistic practice attends to relationships, contexts, and emergent properties.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Holon**</mark>\
An entity that is simultaneously a whole in itself and a part of a larger whole. Watersheds are holons within bioregions; communities are holons within watersheds.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Horizon**</mark>\
A configurable area of life or work within a system. In bioregional practice, horizons name the substantive domains a bioregion stewards, such as water, food, energy, learning, or governance.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Hub**</mark>\
A node in a network that connects many other nodes. Hubs play disproportionate roles in flow, coordination, and resilience.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**I**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Indicator**</mark>\
A measurable signal that reflects the state or trajectory of a system. Good indicators are sensitive, meaningful, and connected to the conditions they represent.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Indigenous knowledge**</mark>\
The bodies of knowledge developed and held by indigenous peoples through long relationship with specific territories. A distinct epistemology, not a subset of scientific knowledge.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Indigenous sovereignty**</mark>\
The inherent right of indigenous peoples to self-determination, including governance of their lands, resources, knowledge, and cultural practices.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Inflection point**</mark>\
A moment in a system's trajectory where the rate or direction of change shifts substantially. Often invisible until passed.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Integrative**</mark>\
Bringing distinct elements into coherent relationship without erasing their differences. Integrative work is more than additive; it produces wholes that hold their parts in productive tension.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Integrative Intervention Cluster (IIC)**</mark>\
A methodology for addressing complex systemic challenges through synergistic portfolios of multi-level interventions that operate as a living architecture rather than as separately managed projects.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Intentionality**</mark>\
The quality of being oriented toward a purpose. In coordination work, intentionality distinguishes deliberate practice from reactive response.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Interdependence**</mark>\
The condition in which the wellbeing or function of one entity depends on the wellbeing or function of others. Recognized as a foundational property of living systems and human societies.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Intergenerational**</mark>\
Extending across generations. Intergenerational thinking takes the perspective of future generations alongside present ones in decisions affecting long timescales.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Interoperability**</mark>\
The ability of distinct systems to work together through shared protocols, formats, or interfaces. A precondition for coordination across organizational or jurisdictional boundaries.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Intervention**</mark>\
A deliberate action taken to shift a system's behavior or trajectory. Effective interventions identify leverage points where small changes produce large effects.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**J**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Jurisdiction**</mark>\
The geographic and legal area within which an authority has the right to govern. Bioregional coordination often spans multiple jurisdictions and requires governance that operates across rather than within them.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**K**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Keystone species**</mark>\
A species whose presence has a disproportionate effect on the structure and function of its ecosystem, such that its removal causes substantial change.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Knowledge commons**</mark>\
A body of knowledge held and stewarded collectively, accessible to those who use it and governed by shared protocols rather than private ownership.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Knowledge stream**</mark>\
A distinct tradition or source of knowing, such as scientific data, situated experience, indigenous knowledge, or relational mapping. Integrative practice draws from multiple streams.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**L**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Land use**</mark>\
The human activities and management practices applied to a given area of land. Land use patterns shape ecological function, social relations, and economic flows.

**Landscape**\
A spatial mosaic of ecosystems, land uses, and cultural patterns at scales larger than individual sites and smaller than entire regions. The unit at which many ecological processes operate.

**Leverage point**\
A place in a complex system where a small intervention can produce large effects. Identifying leverage points is central to effective systemic work.

**Linked autonomy**\
A coordination pattern in which distinct entities maintain local self-determination while remaining coherent with larger systems they are part of. Common in bioregional governance.

**Living system**\
A system that exhibits the properties of life: self-organization, adaptation, metabolism, and the capacity to maintain itself through ongoing relationship with its environment.

**Long now**\
A perspective on time that takes the next ten thousand years as the relevant horizon for present decisions. Contrasts with short-term thinking dominant in most institutional decision-making.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**M**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Meta-systemic**\
Operating at a level above individual systems, addressing how systems relate to and influence one another. Meta-systemic coordination emerges when multiple coherent systems interact.

**Methodology**\
A structured approach to producing knowledge or carrying out work. A methodology specifies how, not just what.

**Metric**\
A specific measure used to track a condition or outcome. Metrics shape attention and behavior; what gets measured tends to get prioritized.

**Migration corridor**\
A route along which species move between habitats, often across seasons or generations. A central concern in landscape-scale conservation planning.

**Mosaic**\
A spatial pattern of distinct elements arranged in relationship. Used in ecology to describe landscape patterns and in social analysis to describe diverse but interconnected communities.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Multi-Flow Value Model (MFVM)**</mark>\
A value framework recognizing that bioregional and economic life involves multiple distinct flows of value beyond financial capital, including ecological, social, knowledge, relational, and temporal flows.

**Multi-stakeholder**\
Involving multiple parties with distinct interests, perspectives, and forms of authority. Multi-stakeholder coordination is the normal condition in bioregional work.

**Mutual aid**\
A practice of voluntary, reciprocal support among community members, organized around shared need rather than charity or transaction.

**Mutualism**\
A biological relationship in which two or more species benefit from their interaction. Used more broadly to describe relationships in which cooperation produces shared advantage.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**N**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Narrative**\
A structured story that gives meaning to events, conditions, or possibilities. Narratives shape how communities understand themselves and what futures they consider possible.

**Natural capital**\
The stock of natural assets, including ecosystems, biodiversity, soil, water, and atmosphere, that provide flows of ecological services to human and other life.

**Nested system**\
A system that contains and is contained by other systems at different scales. Communities are nested within watersheds, watersheds within bioregions, bioregions within larger ecological systems.

**Network**\
A set of nodes connected by relationships. Networks differ from hierarchies in that authority and flow are distributed rather than centralized.

**Niche**\
The functional role and position of an organism or entity within its larger system. A niche is defined by relationships, not by physical location alone.

**Node**\
A point of connection or activity within a network. Nodes vary in their connectivity, influence, and function.

**Nonlinearity**\
The property of systems in which outputs are not proportional to inputs. Small causes can produce large effects, and large causes can produce small effects.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**O**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Ontology**\
The study of what exists and how it exists. In framework practice, an ontology specifies what a framework treats as real and how its components relate.

**Open source**\
A development and distribution model in which knowledge, code, or design is made freely available for use, modification, and redistribution under shared terms.

**Operationalize**\
To translate a concept or principle into practical methods, structures, and actions that can be applied in real conditions.

**Orientation**\
The act of locating oneself within a larger context to make sense of where one is and where one is going. Orientation precedes effective action.

**Outcome**\
A condition that results from action over time. Distinct from output (what is produced) and impact (the broader systemic effect).

**Overshoot**\
The condition in which a system's activity exceeds the capacity of its supporting environment to sustain it. Ecological overshoot is a defining condition of the present moment.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**P**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Participatory**\
Involving those affected by a decision in making it. Participatory practice distributes authority over outcomes among those whose lives the outcomes shape.

**Pattern**\
A recurring arrangement or behavior in a system. Recognizing patterns is foundational to understanding complex systems where individual events are less revealing than the patterns beneath them.

**Pattern language**\
A structured collection of design patterns that can be combined to address problems within a domain. Originated in architecture and adapted to many fields including software, organization, and ecology.

<mark style="color:$primary;">**Perception-Coordination Threshold**</mark>\
The scale at which a system can still be perceived as a whole by its members and where meaningful coordination remains possible without abstraction.

**Permaculture**\
A design approach that creates sustainable human settlements by applying patterns observed in natural ecosystems, integrating land use, agriculture, water, energy, and community.

**Place-based**\
Grounded in the specific conditions, relationships, and character of a particular location. Place-based practice resists generic application of methods regardless of context.

**Placemaking**\
The practice of shaping spaces to support meaningful relationships between people and the places they inhabit. Often community-led and incremental.

**Polycentric governance**\
A governance arrangement in which multiple centers of authority operate at different scales and across different domains, coordinating without centralization.

**Pollution**\
The introduction of substances or energy into an environment at rates that exceed the environment's capacity to absorb them, producing harm to ecological or human systems.

**Polyculture**\
An agricultural practice that grows multiple species together in the same area, producing diversity, resilience, and ecological function that monocultures lack.

**Praxis**\
The integration of theory and practice through reflective action. Praxis distinguishes deliberate, learning-oriented practice from routine or reactive doing.

**Precautionary principle**\
A decision-making approach that places the burden of proof on those proposing potentially harmful action, rather than requiring proof of harm before restricting it.

**Process design**\
The deliberate shaping of how work unfolds over time, including who participates, what sequences activities follow, and what feedback loops connect stages.

**Protocol**\
An agreed set of rules or procedures that enables coordination among parties. Protocols make repeated interaction possible without renegotiation each time.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**Q**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Qualitative**\
Concerned with the nature, quality, or character of something rather than its quantity. Qualitative methods access dimensions that numbers alone cannot capture.

**Quantitative**\
Concerned with measurement and numerical analysis. Quantitative methods produce data that can be compared, aggregated, and tracked systematically.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**R**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Reciprocity**\
A relationship of mutual giving and receiving, in which obligations and benefits flow in both directions over time. A foundational principle in indigenous governance and commons practice.

**Regeneration**\
The restoration and ongoing renewal of a system's capacity to sustain itself. Distinguished from sustainability, which maintains current conditions; regeneration rebuilds capacity that has been lost.

**Regenerative agriculture**\
Farming practices that rebuild soil health, biodiversity, water cycles, and ecological function while producing food. Goes beyond reducing harm to actively restoring ecological capacity.

**Regenerative design**\
A design approach that aims to enable systems to develop their own ongoing capacity for self-organization, evolution, and health. Goes beyond sustainability to active capacity-building.

**Regenerative finance**\
Financial practices and instruments designed to fund and verify regenerative outcomes, including ecological restoration, community wellbeing, and ecosystem service value.

**Reinhabitation**\
The practice of becoming a native of a place through deep relationship with its ecology, history, and culture, often after generations of disconnection or displacement.

**Relational**\
Centered on relationships rather than isolated entities. Relational thinking recognizes that beings, events, and meanings are constituted through their connections.

**Resilience**\
The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while maintaining essentially the same function, structure, and identity.

**Resonance**\
A condition in which coherent systems amplify one another's capabilities through their interaction. Distinct from cooperation (transactional) and coordination (logistical); resonance is emergent.

**Restoration**\
The active practice of recovering ecological function in degraded systems. Restoration may aim to return a system to a former state or to reestablish capacity for ongoing self-organization.

**Rewilding**\
A conservation practice that restores ecological processes and relationships, often by reintroducing missing species and reducing human management to allow ecosystems to self-organize.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**S**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Scaffold**\
A structure that supports development without becoming the development itself. Scaffolds are temporary or background, enabling work that proceeds through them.

**Scale**\
The spatial, temporal, or organizational level at which a system or process operates. Many phenomena change qualitatively at different scales; what holds at one may not hold at another.

**Scenario**\
A coherent narrative description of how the future might unfold under specified conditions. Used in planning to explore possibilities rather than predict outcomes.

**Self-organization**\
The emergence of pattern, structure, or order from the interactions of system components without external direction. A defining property of living and complex systems.

**Sensemaking**\
The ongoing process of giving meaning to experience, especially in conditions of uncertainty or novelty. Collective sensemaking is foundational to shared coordination.

**Sensing**\
The active practice of attending to a system's signals, including ecological data, situated knowledge, social patterns, and emergent conditions. Sensing precedes effective response.

**Signal**\
An observable indication of a condition or change in a system. Signals require interpretation and context to become meaningful.

**Situated knowledge**\
Knowledge produced from a specific position, relationship, or location. Recognizes that all knowing happens from somewhere and that situated perspectives reveal what abstracted views cannot.

**Social-ecological system**\
A system that integrates human social dynamics with ecological processes as a single interconnected whole, rather than treating them as separate domains.

**Sovereignty**\
The authority of a people, community, or entity to govern itself without external imposition. Operates across scales from individual to indigenous nation to bioregion.

**Stakeholder**\
A party with interest in or influence over a system, decision, or outcome. Stakeholder analysis maps who is affected and who can act within a given context.

**Stewardship**\
The practice of caring for a resource, place, or system on behalf of present and future beings. Distinct from ownership; stewardship implies responsibility without claim.

**Subsidiarity**\
A governance principle that decisions should be made at the smallest, most local scale capable of addressing them effectively. Larger scales engage only where smaller ones cannot.

**Substrate**\
The underlying layer or foundation on which other things develop. In framework practice, a substrate provides the structural ground that more specific work builds upon.

**Succession**\
The ecological process by which communities of species change over time, often in predictable patterns following disturbance.

**Sustainability**\
The capacity of a system or practice to be maintained over the long term. Distinguished from regeneration, which actively rebuilds capacity rather than merely maintaining existing conditions.

**Symbiosis**\
A close, prolonged relationship between organisms of different species, which may be mutually beneficial, neutral, or parasitic.

**Synergy**\
The combined effect of components working together that exceeds the sum of their individual effects. Synergistic relationships are central to ecological function and effective coordination.

**Systemic**\
Pertaining to the whole system rather than its parts. Systemic thinking attends to relationships, feedback loops, and emergent patterns rather than isolated components.

**System**\
A set of interrelated components functioning together as a whole. Systems have boundaries, components, relationships, and patterns of behavior over time.

**Systems thinking**\
A way of understanding the world that emphasizes relationships, feedback, patterns, and dynamics rather than isolated events or linear cause and effect.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**T**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Taxonomy**\
A structured classification system that organizes entities or concepts into categories and relationships. Taxonomies enable shared language and consistent reference within and across fields.

**Territory**\
A defined area associated with a community, species, or governance system. Distinct from land in that territory implies relationship, claim, or jurisdiction, not just physical extent.

**Theory of change**\
A structured articulation of how and why a desired change is expected to happen, including assumptions, conditions, and pathways from current state to intended outcomes.

**Threshold**\
A point at which a small change in conditions produces a substantial shift in system behavior. Thresholds often mark transitions between qualitatively different states.

**Tipping point**\
A threshold at which a system shifts irreversibly into a new state. May be ecological, social, economic, or systemic.

**Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)**\
A body of knowledge developed by indigenous and local communities through long observation and relationship with specific ecosystems, transmitted across generations.

**Trajectory**\
The path a system is moving along over time. Distinct from a snapshot or current state; trajectory captures direction and rate of change.

**Transition**\
A period of substantial change between two relatively stable system states. Transitions are often turbulent and reveal which patterns are essential and which are contingent.

**Transparency**\
The condition in which information, processes, and decisions are visible to those affected by them. A precondition for accountability and informed participation.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**U**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Unified taxonomy**\
A shared classification structure adopted across multiple parties or frameworks, enabling consistent reference and interoperability where separate vocabularies would otherwise produce friction.

**Upstream**\
Toward the source. In watersheds, the upper portion of a river system. Used metaphorically to describe causes earlier in a chain of effects, where intervention is often more effective than addressing symptoms downstream.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**V**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Value flow**\
The movement of value through a system over time. Value flows include financial, ecological, social, cultural, and other forms; multiple flows operate simultaneously in any living system.

**Value plurality**\
The recognition that value takes multiple forms that cannot be reduced to a single measure. Distinguished from monetary reduction, which translates all value into financial terms.

**Vector**\
A direction of change or a carrier of influence within a system. Vectors describe where forces are pushing, not just what is currently the case.

**Viability**\
The capacity of a system to continue functioning over time given its conditions and constraints. Viable systems maintain the relationships and feedback needed to persist.

**Vision**\
An articulated picture of a desired future state that orients present action. Strong visions are specific enough to guide and open enough to evolve.

## <mark style="color:$primary;">**W**</mark> <a href="#a" id="a"></a>

**Waste**\
Output that a system cannot reabsorb or use. In living systems, waste from one process typically becomes input for another; the concept of waste as discardable is largely an industrial construction.

**Watershed**\
An area of land where all water drains to a common outlet, such as a river, lake, or estuary. A natural unit of ecological coordination that often crosses political boundaries.

**Weave**\
The interlocking of distinct elements into a coherent fabric. Used in coordination work to describe the integration of perspectives, practices, or knowledge streams.

**Wellbeing**\
The condition of flourishing across physical, emotional, social, ecological, and cultural dimensions. A broader measure than economic prosperity alone.

**Wisdom**\
Knowledge integrated with judgment, experience, and ethical attention. Wisdom traditions hold practical knowing developed across generations and shaped by relationship to place and people.

{% hint style="info" %}

### **A living glossary**

This glossary evolves with the field. Terms are added, refined, and revisited as practice and understanding develop.

To nominate a term, propose a correction, or contribute a perspective on an existing entry, reach out through the chat widget in the right corner. If you would like to be added to the contributor list, include your name in your message. Contributions are integrated into subsequent versions.

<sup>*<mark style="color:$primary;">**Current version:**</mark>*</sup><sup>*&#x20;<mark style="color:$primary;"></mark>*</sup><sup>*<mark style="color:$primary;">v2026.05.12. Updated quarterly or as substantive changes warrant.</mark>*</sup>
{% endhint %}

<details>

<summary><mark style="color:$primary;"><strong>Contributors</strong></mark></summary>

This glossary is shaped by ongoing contributions from practitioners, researchers, and members of the bioregional field.

* Kim Sellberg
* Sara Featherston

</details>


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