Sustainability and resilience through connection: the economic metacommunities of the Western USA

Regional social, environmental, and economic systems form a rich web of connections that both create opportunities and pose risks. Regional economies, characterized by their interconnectedness across jurisdictional boundaries, might be better managed at a transboundary scale because they can leverage a broad resource pool and greater economic diversity compared to a single jurisdiction alone. The technical challenge is to identify which economies are connected and could be managed collectively to better mitigate, absorb, and recover from disruptions. Economic risk management often occurs at the state level, but network approaches can identify groups that interact with one another based on actual commodity flows, capturing important features of the system that are not currently coordinated. One such approach, based on ecological theory, is to identify economic metacommunities. We use theories and methods from metacommunity ecology to identify overarching structures in the Western U.S. trade network. Specifically, we construct commodity flow networks for 25 metro and rural areas, then assess these using the ecological concepts of interaction strength, diversity, clusters, and sources and sinks to identify five economic metacommunities. Based on metacommunity membership, we answer the question: Which regions in the Western USA are interdependent, and are interdependent regions spatially proximate or not? These results are useful in economic development and infrastructure planning for developing redundancy, targeting vulnerable interdependencies, and understanding potential risks from adverse policy exposure.