Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby give a graphical analysis of how the United States uses its land in their Bloomberg article. The forty-eight contiguous states are just under two billion acres of land, classifying land into six categories: pasture/range, forest, cropland, special-use, miscellaneous, and urban (Merrill, 2018). Pasture and rangeland make up the largest share of land use, over a third, while forest area makes up about a quarter. Cropland is the third largest use, taking up about a fifth of total land, even though the amount of land used for food production that Americans consume is very small. Special-use land consists of national parks, wildlife areas, highways, railroads, and military bases. Miscellaneous land use is made up of what’s considered to be of “low economic value,” such as cemeteries, golf courses, marshes and deserts (Merrill, 2018). The last major category, urban, is the smallest percentage of total land use but the fastest growing one, adding 1 million acres a year. With 80% of Americans living in these areas, it’s easy to see why urban areas greatly contribute to our economy relative to the other categories (Merrill, 2018).

​

According to The New York Times, federal government ownership of about forty-seven percent of all land in the West is a topic for debate. While the federal government acquired the land when purchasing it to become new states, many in the area feel the land use should be decided by private firms or the state government (Bui, 2016). While this is the case in the Midwest, much of the West still remains in the federal government’s hands because they are mountainous or difficult to reach, being unattractive for settlers to purchase (Bui, 2016). Some of the land has now been conserved for various reasons, but other areas are still available for ranchers to lease (Bui, 2016). There is still discontent present over federal ownership, but it has been proven that their rent rates are lower than private owners, and state adoption of the land would lead to steep additional costs a year for state governments (Bui, 2016).

My visualizations use the same data set analyzed in the Bloomberg article. Provided by the USDA Economic Research Services (ERS) unit, The Major Land Use (MLU) series data set records the percentage of total land use dedicated to each of the six categories mentioned earlier (with “grassland” replacing pasture/range), for each of the fifty states. For this reason, we are able to use Tableau to make state-level and national-level analyses. The data set also records every state’s total acreage for each of the six categories, measured in thousands of acres. This means for my state, Oregon, a data record of just over 61,000 acres really means there are over 61 million acres of total land in the state.

The dashboard included consists of the forty-eight contiguous United States, maps of Alaska and Hawaii, a bar chart ranking states’ land use according to acreage and percentage, and a table summarizing these statistics for each category of land. The entire visualization can be filtered by a land use category in the form of a custom legend. In this case, the variables present are each state, the land use, the percent of total land use, and the total acreage.

Filtering the dashboard, we can see that the states with the highest percentage of grassland are in the southwestern area of the United States. Grassland makes up 29% of total US land use, with Nevada having the highest percentage of grassland. Looking at forests, which make up almost 28% of total US land use, it’s shown that Maine and the eastern side of the country have the highest percentage of land use dedicated to forests. Alaska has the most acreage. Cropland contributes around 17% to total land use, with the Midwest states dominating the percentage rankings - Iowa’s cropland makes up almost 75% of their total land. Special-use land makes up about 14% of total US land use, but doesn’t vary nearly as much across each state relative to the first three categories, with the exception of Alaska’s 40% of usage and also highest acreage. Alaska also dominates in both percentage and acreage for miscellaneous use, which has a national percentage of 8% of total use and is otherwise pretty evenly spread. Lastly, urban areas contribute to only 3% of total use and have higher percentages in the northeastern US. The District of Columbia is entirely urban, while Texas has the most acreage for grassland, cropland, and urban areas.

Observing my state, Oregon, it’s shown that the majority of the state is made up of grassland (38%) and forests (39%). Cropland, special-use, and miscellaneous each make up around 7% of total land use, leaving urban to make up just over 1% of land use. This is a different allocation than national statistics, showing that the state is more dedicated towards the natural environment than urban and residential development.  

In lecture, we are in the middle of discussing land. We talked about if land were to be allocated to its highest value, we would see residential areas be at the center while agriculture and wilderness would claim the surrounding area that have less access to markets. Reading in the Bloomberg article that urban areas contribute greatly to our economy’s GDP, this discussion makes sense to me and could also explain why it’s the fastest growing land use category. We also discussed that there are three broad categories for land use classification: residential development, agriculture, and wilderness. The visualizations break up these categories slightly, but overall, the categories presented could arguably be consistent with our lesson.

​

​

​

References

Bui, Q., & Sanger-katz, M. (2016, January 6). Why the Government Owns So Much Land in the West. Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/why-the-government-owns-so-much-land-in-the-west.html

Major Land Use (MLU) series, 2012. [Data set]. USDA Economic Research Service (2017).

Merrill, D., & Leatherby, L. (2018, July 31). Here's How America Uses Its Land. Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/