Become passionate about maps and mapping. The minute you start looking for maps of your bioregion, you will discover the frustrating inadequacies of most existing ones. Street maps obscure the geographical features. Topographical maps ignore the vegetation. Vegetation maps leave out the historical sites.
Watershed maps stop abruptly at county, state, or national borders, even though the water flows on.
Consult Boundaries of Home, edited by Doug Aberley, for a useful introduction to bio-cartography. Too often current place names reflect only the relatively recent human history of the area. Go beyond the names of dead royalty and foreign colonizers, to learn the ancient names, which are usually more evocative of the original character of the landscape. If the area still retains its indigenous name, find out what it means. The local bioregional group, therefore, is called the Wild Onion Alliance and its totem plant is the Allium cernuum, a prairie species, one of several native onion plants which perfume the air of remnant wildlands in the early spring.