Bioregioning Tayside
🌐Bioregioning Tayside takes a non-anthropocentric, place-based approach to regional regeneration, centering ecological systems alongside human communities. Guided by the principle "change the frame, change the story," the initiative aims to cultivate new narratives of place that support resilience in the face of climate disruption, biodiversity loss, and economic instability.
Bioregional Context
A substantial region in Central Scotland centered around the River Tay catchment system, extending from mountains through to the Tay estuary. The area encompasses diverse landscapes, including one of Europe's most important Atlantic salmon spawning grounds. Their bioregion represents a significant portion of central Scotland's landmass, with varied ecosystems from highland to coastal areas.
- Network Affiliation
- BioFi Project
Background
Tayside is a large swath of central Scotland organized around the River Tay catchment—from mountain headwaters to the estuary—where Atlantic salmon and varied ecosystems tie upland, strath, and coast into one hydrological story. The initiative treats that whole gradient as the practical frame for regeneration work.
Origins and Network
Bioregioning Tayside grew out of the Cateran Ecomuseum’s “museum in the landscape,” which prepared the lead organizers to think at bioregional scale. They stay connected across Tayside and with peer initiatives such as [Bioregional Learning Centre South Devon]], which helped them get started. [The core team is small, held together by long collaboration, friendship, and shared care for the living world.
A theory of change and catchment-wide strategic goals are still in draft. Learning is mostly organic—convened when an issue forces collective attention—and technical support is bought in when grants allow (for example, a leading Scottish food journalist serves as Food Ambassador).
Activities
Tayside Community Science Initiative
As one of five NatureScot pilots, the initiative asks how community-led monitoring can strengthen resilience and regeneration—grounded in place-based knowledge, shared learning, and collective agency. An opening mapping phase surfaced recurring problems: incompatible methods across groups, weak hooks to regional or national strategies, and cases where communities collect extensive data but rarely see direct benefit. The team is now documenting live examples—from flood monitoring to heritage work on how Strathmore land-use history altered water paths—and asking what adaptive governance would mean for community monitoring that actually feeds decisions.
River Ericht Catchment Restoration
The Ericht is among Europe’s most important Atlantic salmon spawning systems. Restoration finance nationally falls short of need; new policy instruments are appearing, and this project is testing how to operate in that shifting policy and funding terrain. Work includes woodland and peatland restoration, with salmon survival as the narrative anchor: as one participant put it, many doubt salmon can persist—“but we’re going to do our best to see what we can do.” Habitat repair is treated as the decisive lever for keeping salmon in these rivers.
River Detectives
River Detectives extends the community-science approach toward catchment care. From August 2023 to August 2024, residents researched historic management of rivers, bogs, and lochans—asking what past practices might teach present stewardship. The Flax & Flood strand traced mills, weather, and water—how nineteenth-century climate shifts and extreme events shaped operations and supply. That historical ecological knowledge informs today’s questions. Part 2 turns toward systematic monitoring so communities can describe current river conditions and inform management choices.
Strategy Games
From 2023-2025, a strategy game was implemented in the Ericht catchment bioregion. The process began with listening to diverse stakeholders—farmers, anglers, land managers, estate owners, and community leaders—to understand their roles and perceptions. This information formed the basis for a prototype game representing the landscape's resources and dynamics. The games help players visualize interconnections across the landscape, demonstrating how individual actions impact others' livelihoods and environmental conditions.
Stocktake and Gap Analysis
Between autumn 2024 and early 2025, two directors held ten conversations with [[Dark Matter Labs]], working through fifteen dimensions of how the Tay might one day host bioregional financing facilities without being pulled into finance-as-usual.The stocktake and gap analysis summary names what followed: most effort still moves on grants; directors absorb much of the labour unpaid; the orchestrated live portfolio stays narrow while a longer shelf of ideas waits on restricted funds and courage. Relationships with power and place are understood in the room more often than in a single shared atlas; bioregion-wide visioning is deliberately cautious because neighbours want motion, not another talking shop. Pilots such as the Ericht point toward MRV and a possible nature-finance aggregation path, yet no Tay-dedicated financial vehicle exists—only the question of what must harden first so a facility could be trustworthy rather than ornamental.
Vision and Legacy
Priorities on the horizon include deeper mapping (including carbon sequestration options), a possible nature-finance aggregation platform so varied restoration projects can connect to capital, regenerative tourism, and more intentional choices about digital tools—alongside persistent questions of skills and governance. Funding remains the binding constraint: work is overwhelmingly grant-funded, nature-finance experiments are fragile under policy and corporate uncertainty, and no dedicated bioregional financial institutions exist yet. Engagement has been project-led and trust-based; a full bioregion-wide visioning process is still pending. Land and power in Scotland, thin investment in relationships, capacity gaps for restoration at pace, burnout, and the sheer complexity of restoration all slow change—yet visible projects and community voice are shifting what Tayside believes is possible, with arts and culture seen as under-used levers when resources allow.