Every coordination architecture chooses a primary addressing unit, and the choice carries the architecture’s assumptions about who counts as a coordinating actor. The Economy uses the nation-state. Every phone number, tax ID, currency, and legal jurisdiction pins its identifier to a country code first. The BioConomy uses the BioRegion. Every BioHub address, currency, service catalogue, and coordination surface pins its identifier to its place in the biosphere first.
The addressing pattern
Every BioHub and BioRegion is registered in the BioHubs directory at an address of the form biohubs.bioconomy.earth/{realm}/{code}-{name}. The realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms. The code joins the two-letter realm prefix to the two-digit RESOLVE biome number, and the name is a short name for the BioHub or BioRegion. The Valley of Grace BioHub is registered at biohubs.bioconomy.earth/afrotropic/at12-vog, and the Overberg BioRegion that coordinates it at biohubs.bioconomy.earth/afrotropic/at12-overberg: at is the Afrotropic realm and 12 the Mediterranean Forests, Woodlands and Scrub biome. The address reads from the largest biogeographic unit down to the local one. There is no country field.
The absence is deliberate. Country codes are the addressing layer of the Economy and inherit its assumptions: that a bounded territorial polity is the primary unit of coordination, that a passport determines who can act, that a border decides where a service ends. None of those hold in the E form. A watershed does not stop at a border. A coordination surface published in the directory is read by peers on other continents in the same reading action a same-country peer reads it.
Why the choice matters
The address a coordination architecture publishes is one of the traces the stigmergic pattern reads. When a coordinator arrives at biohubs.bioconomy.earth/afrotropic/at12-vog and finds a realm and a biome ahead of the BioHub’s name and no country segment at all, the address itself says what the BioHub is doing: coordinating at the scale of the living landscape the code names, above the scale of the political jurisdiction that happens to contain that landscape today. When the same coordinator arrives at biohubs.bioconomy.earth/za/at12-vog, the address says something different: this BioHub coordinates within a national frame, and the national frame is the primary sort. The pattern reproduces the coordination logic of the Economy inside the E form.
The Substrate Hypothesis applies here as it applies everywhere. Coordination is a property of the substrate. Address is part of the substrate. An address that leads with a country code invites the coordination behavior countries expect. An address that leads with a bioregion code invites the coordination behavior the biosphere expects.
What the addressing scheme actually holds
The RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017 dataset maps 847 ecoregions across eight biogeographic realms and 14 biomes, drawn from vegetation type, climate zone, evolutionary history, and biogeographic distribution. Borders play no role in the boundary lines. The address code is the first layer of the dataset’s own identifiers: the Overberg’s ecoregions carry IDs such as AT1202, whose first four characters are the code at12. A BioRegion’s home page in the directory lists the ecoregions it covers. The One Earth Bioregions Framework groups the same ecoregions into 185 bioregions; the address uses the RESOLVE realm and biome directly. Where a bioregion crosses a national border (the Great Karoo, the Congo Basin, the Amazon), the addressing scheme treats the bioregion as one unit and lets the geopolitical layer sort itself out at the layer where geopolitical concerns belong.
Every address carries a name. Many BioHubs will share a realm and biome, and the name is what tells them apart: at12-vog and at12-overberg share the code at12. A BioRegion that coordinates several BioHubs is registered alongside them under the same realm, as the Overberg is at afrotropic/at12-overberg, and its page lists the BioHubs it coordinates.
What the choice rules out and what it enables
Ruled out: any inter-BioHub coordination pattern that requires a country field to route or resolve. A BioHub in the Amazon and a BioHub in the Congo Basin read each other’s coordination surfaces on the same terms as two BioHubs in the same watershed. The address itself makes no distinction.
Enabled: coordination that scales from parcel to planet through one continuous addressing convention. A BioPlace belongs to a BioHub which belongs to a BioRegion which belongs to a realm which belongs to the biosphere. Every layer of the BioStack is addressable through the same convention, and every layer is discoverable by any peer without prior geopolitical context.
Where the habit shows up
Bioregional addressing extends past URLs. Currency codes (ZA-FiCom is a first-generation instance and its successors will drop the country prefix as the pattern matures), service catalogue identifiers, verification credentials, and coordination-surface routing all follow the same convention. Every time the corpus writes an address, it is casting a vote about what unit the coordination sits inside. The habit is instilled by writing it consistently.
Related pages
- Stigmergy
- Substrate Hypothesis
- Economy versus BioConomy
- The BioPlace Layer
- How to Build a BioHub Wiki
- How the BioConomy Coordinates
- BioRegion
- BioHub
- BioStack
- Coordination Surface
- Wiki Network
- BioHubs Directory
Sources
- Dinerstein, E. et al. (2017). An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm. BioScience, 67(6), 534-545. RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017.
- One Earth (2023). Bioregions 2023. oneearth.org/bioregions-2023.
- Heylighen, F. (2016). Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism.
Provenance
Written 4 September 2026 as the concept-level treatment of the BioConomy’s addressing scheme and its rejection of country-code prefixes. Names the addressing choice as substrate design: the address itself carries the coordination logic the architecture wants to instill. Companion to the naming-convention update in How to Build a BioHub Wiki made on the same date. The concept was named to give the habit somewhere to sit in the corpus so subsequent addressing decisions (currencies, credentials, service catalogues) can cite the same rationale.
Revised 28 September 2026. All BioHubs and BioRegions are now registered in the BioHubs directory at biohubs.bioconomy.earth. The addressing pattern moved from per-BioHub subdomains ({bioregion}-{slug}.bioconomy.earth) to paths in the directory (/{realm}/{code}-{name}), the code now uses the RESOLVE biome number in place of the One Earth bioregion number, and the rule allowing a code without a name was dropped. The argument for leaving out the country field is unchanged.