Consumer Ecoregions: Geographic Segmentation of the Western Conterminous United States of America

Abstract

A new partition of geographic regions in the Western US, based on environmental variables rather than political borders, is introduced as an alternative approach to aggregation of consumer demand data. The classification exercise described in this paper led to the definition of twelve distinct geographic regions representing the same area as seventeen corresponding western States. In comparison to the partition of States, these Consumer Ecoregions (CERs) demonstrate less variability in terms of population and economic output while representing distinct climates and landscapes and maintaining similar variability in terms of land area.