Land use in the US

Why? It gives people a relatable size and shape to compare to. Like saying the 100 richest landowners own equivalent to Florida.

i really do not understand how anyone can be confused by this, obviously it's not a geographical map because new mexico does not contain the sum total of all american railways..

It's a fine graph that gives an intuitive sense for how much area is used for each thing.

I kind of like it tbh

I'm glad this community is following in the tradition of the reddit one, ugly graphics that communicate nothing useful yet somehow get upvoted to the top

Yeah, this is a pretty appalling graphic that maybe seemed good in theory but is hostile to the reader in practice.

I like seeing the area.

Oooooh. I assumed it was supposed to have a geographic relation. Yes, this is extremely unclear.

Has anyone started c/terriblemaps yet?

Ah, that makes sense. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but it makes more sense than looking at this as an actual map.

This seems like it was developed as a joke. Not what I'm looking for in a data-oriented forum.

cannot believe how many people are confused that the use blocks aren't showing use in that location, just size in relation to the size of the country

I'd say put me under #3, but I'd need you to draw me a map and we all know how that went last time

Thanks for putting out what is at least an interesting and engaging graphic for us to comment on! I myself have two of the three reactions you listed

!fuck_cars@lemmy.ml is leaking.

Streets aren't really mentioned either, besides "Rural highways". I assume other streets and parking spaces are mostly included in "Urban/Rural housing" and/or "Urban commercial" (smaller rural streets might not be counted seperately from the surrounding land).

That was the first thing I was looking for too.

That entire block that says "ethanol" is corn, plus that entire block that says corn syrup, and a good chunk of that block that says "livestock feed". It's a lot of corn.

It's in there, it's just split up between food we eat, livestock feed, feed exports, ethanol, and corn syrup. Not all those categories are all corn but even then corn will be a lot of it.

Right?

It’s completely missing North Dakota which, when I visited was mostly corn. This is misleading at best.

It takes 76% less land for us to just eat plants, rather than to grow them to feed to animals that we then in turn eat. Really amazing how inefficient it is.

It's just wrong though. Deserts are particularly huge in the West. Essentially the whole states of Arizona and New Mexico, plus parts of Utah and Nevada.

They're probably inside the "parks" part.

Without digging in to the numbers further than just looking at this map, could this be because the relative areas of the factors you listed didn't pass a threshold to make it? @ezmack what data source was used for this?

Urban-commercial

its also missing the fact that tons of animal pastures is on federal land.

Those take up less space than you'd think

Sounds like we need to make a c/fuckgolf

You must live in Augusta too, huh?

Every single home is in the northeast

Is this a glorified pie chart? Follow-up question: Why is this not just an actual pie chart?

The conversion losses to feed animals is very high. It takes 76% less land for us to subsist on plants rather than to eat meat. Well, actually, that's the world average, it might be even higher in the US because of its higher meat consumption. I should check the study again.

But I feel like land for cows is akin to food we eat because we eat a lot of those cows also.

uae bypass paywalls clean, works wonders on that website

Anytime

They're a timber company

Quite a bit? a reservation isn't land use lmao. The Navajo rez probably makes up a good chunk of that sheep grazing for example. Native people use the land too, it isn't just there.

I get the sentiment but thats absolutely not relevant to this data.

This doesn't show where these uses are located on a map, just the area of land relative to the total country.

Heck I want to know where Alaska and Hawaii went.

Plenty of courses are perfectly fine uses of land. The bigger problem are those lush, luxury courses out in the FUCKING DESERT. Seriously fuck every course between LA and Phoenix.

The original article does specify contiguous US.

I wonder how bad it'll get before we get some kind of prescribed burn policy. Smoky summers suuuuck. Having your house or town burn down in an out of control wildfire sucks even more.

Also if the wildfires that started naturally were allowed to burn (if not threatening the public) then we don't get that huge build up of dead wood getting dryer and dryer leading to a super scorcher that nothing can stop.

Okay, but wouldn't that be better labeled under "Gender Reveals"?

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/what-is-fallow-ground.htm#:~:text=Fallow%20ground%2C%20or%20fallow%20soil,five%20years%2C%20depending%20on%20crop.

i.e. appears to be unused farmland?

Its not location based. It just means the total amount of fallow lans in the contiguous US is about equal to Michigan.

100 people don't own Florida and more.

I assume it's stuck in a court process, or in the process of transitioning to another status, or farmland without a crop, or maybe abandoned but the city can't pay to clear it or demo it yet, etc.

Idk didn't bother going around the pay wall just thought it looked cool. I'd guess the area of land that is idle/fallow is the size of michigan

It doesn't represent state by state.

I don't thing it's location specific. It's more like a pie chart where it's grouping the similar land typess together and then arbitrarily placing them on the US map.

I don't think this map shows where those things are, just how big they are in total. I'm not from the USA but I'm guessing there isn't just one gigantic ass national park up north and no more parks anywhere else.

I think the idea is, e.g. if farmed land would be a state what would be it's size?

It seems you're misunderstanding the map. It's how much space each of those categories is taking up as a fraction of the total area of the contiguous US, not where that land use primarily occurs.

You're mis, mis MISUNDERSTANDING this map.

Wow, look how much more land would be available if we just stopped eating cows!!!!

Apparently this doesn't show the locations of the separate industries, rather the landmass usage of said industries.

But it's clearly not broken down by state. Surely it would be nonsensical to put all of airports in the country in a giant square in southern Texas, right? That's not what this map is intending to say.