Surascape networks: from biocultural landscapes to uneven market integration in Thailand

Community liquor production in Thailand is rooted in biocultural landscapes, yet its relationship with urban and tourism markets is spatially uneven. Research explains place-based production and alcohol consumption geographies separately, but rarely connects origin landscapes with consumption networks. This study asks how community liquor production nodes are spatially connected to consumption nodes and what these connections reveal about market integration. It analyses 852 community production nodes, 411 private production nodes, and 14,960 consumption nodes using geospatial mapping, kernel density estimation, nearest Euclidean distance, cumulative access thresholds, and regional and provincial comparison. Community production is concentrated in peripheral biocultural landscapes, particularly in the North and South, and is less accessible to consumption nodes than private production, which clusters within urban and tourism-based markets. The analysis identifies production-dominant areas, consumption-dominant hubs, and limited zones of overlap. The findings extend Surascape from a place-based account of production morphology to a networked cultural economy in which biocultural production, circulation, and consumption are selectively connected. This concept explains how cultural practices may remain locally embedded while their participation in wider markets is structured by uneven accessibility and spatial concentration.