Map Monday... How America Uses Its Land

At the end of July Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby published and article in Bloomberg titled "Here's How America Uses Its Land." Using data from the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) National Land Cover Database (NLCD) they created some interesting and informative maps and statistics about how land us used in the United States. The headline graphic above shows the six major land types they used (Pasture/Range, Forest, Cropland, Special Use (National Parks, Military Bases, highways, etc), Miscellaneous (Cemeteries, Golf Courses, Marshes, Deserts, etc.), and Urban.)

By doing something as simple as aggregating and grouping they generated maps to help put in context what Urban land use of 3.6% looks like in context. It also helps understand how much land (~1M acres a year or 4 squares below) are being converted to urban land use every year.

Ultimately they used the land use information from these sources to group them into categories to help see how the land is being used. Clearly pasture/range and timberland make up a huge percentage of the land use of the United States. Land for the "Food We Eat" is surprisingly small (unless you add livestock feed (127.4M acres) to "Food We Eat" (77.3M acres) for a total of just just over 200M acres.) And who new Wheat and Oil Seeds dominated the "Food We Eat?"

Take a look at all of the maps and statistics, it's a lot of fun. And grow some Christmas Trees, we need them to beat out Tobacco on the US Land Use Map!