Land use in the US

This is a weird ass pie chart using the US map as a base right? If I am correct then this is a terrible way to display this data.
- Why? It gives people a relatable size and shape to compare to. Like saying the 100 richest landowners own equivalent to Florida.
  
  I get that but it needs to be labeled some way to clarify this at least. A lot of people look at this and could easily think it is what each area has the most of and that the positions of the types of land have something to do with the states they are near or cover.
  
  It's very difficult to compare relative sizes at a glance compared to a pie chart, or other styles like just a bar graph. This is a graph crime.
- 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.
  
  It's really funny to imagine it literally, though.
  "We'll I'd heard some bad things about West Texas highways, but this just seems excessive."
  
  Yeah and Michigan doesn't contain all the idle/fallow land in the US but the problem is some people look at this and think that Michigan contains the most idle/fallow land in the US which is why it was used to represent that portion of the data.
  I feel like there is a single sentence or phrase that could be written above the or near the graphic which would make it clear but I honestly don't know what it is.
- 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.
- Oooooh. I assumed it was supposed to have a geographic relation. Yes, this is extremely unclear.
- Has anyone started c/terriblemaps yet?
- I like seeing the area.
- 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.

Seems like I'm getting 3 reactions to this map:
Neat map
I don't understand this map
I will find you and kill your family for this crime against data
- 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
  
  Wait what? Oh God that's a horrible way to lay out data
- 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
  
  Sick burn
- 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

Because everyone else is shitting on it - I just wanna let you know OP that I actually liked this map

I'd suggest a merger between '100 largest landowning families' and 'Food we eat'.

Why isn't parking on here?
- !fuck_cars@lemmy.ml is leaking.
  
  Oh great, the "everyone lives in cities and I have no concept of rural living" people are here now too.
  Awww, ya'll are butthurt and downvoting me for pointing out not everyone has access to mass transportation or reliable shopping within three blocks of their house.
- 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.
  
  I was looking for the people shocked 100 Americans basically own Florida, that's a whole European country there

expected more corn
- 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.

"Food we eat" is half the size of "livestock feed". Plus look at how small wetlands/deserts are, wetlands especially are essential to climate resillience. What egregiously bad land use, wow. Thanks for this post, it's great.
- 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.
  
  I think you might be on to something with the parks idea. I know California has a Protection Act on the books that covers ours.

I have examined this abstraction of a map thoroughly.
I do not see any garbage dumps, recycling facilities, sewage processing, cemeteries, energy production, water production...
I could carry on, but this map means almost nothing with all sorts of factors missing.
- 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?
  
  Bloomberg article https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/#xj4y7vzkg
  
  Not OP, but I'd think cemeteries should outweigh golf courses in land area.
  Feel free to prove me wrong though.
- 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
  
  Well, I grew up on 60 acres with like 18 horses and 25 goats. Can't say I've visited every farm out there to know how large or how cramped they might be.

I resent the hell out of that golf pimple.

It is absolutely blowing my mind how many people are looking at this and thinking that is trying to show, like, primary land use per block on the map or something?
Like it's well-known that maple syrup comes exclusively from northwest PA, plus all the logging that happens in downtown San Francisco and LA.
- 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 idea is to show that X land use consumes an area equivalent to an easily recognizable state-area
  
  the added context of the US map gives it some utility that a pie chart, which is just straight trash, does not have
  a bar graph or even just a table would convey similar information more precisely and usefully, but if your only goal is to give an intuitive sense of the land use (not writing policy or anything here) it suits
  
  Pie charts are useless in general.
  For the example shown here there are way too many categories for a pie chart. You would not be able to see anything past the top 3 or so categories as the slices get too thin and the labels would be all over the place.
  Lastly you would miss out on the size comparisons to e.g. states.
  This is much better.

the amount of land for cows is crazy. and the fact that more land goes to livestock feed than food we eat is interesting as well
- 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

What's a weirghourhdmsjrhrht?
- They're a timber company

How much is native reservations
- 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.

I'm curious why first nation reservations weren't demarcated. Or maybe they were and I'm just an idiot lol.
- 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.

Disgusting how much space Golf takes up.
- 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.

It's not really the USA without Alaska (and other extracontinental territories, but their landmass probably isn't large enough to change anything).
Or is Alaska included, which would make the presentation of the data even more confusion as it wouldn't even be too scale.
- The original article does specify contiguous US.
  
  Ah, missed that OP included the source. Was here to ask for it, but appreciate you pointing it out!

California also uses their lands for wildfires, they even have a fire season now. Don't forget to give credit where credit is due!
- Okay, but wouldn't that be better labeled under "Gender Reveals"?

What does idle/fallow mean for Michigan?
- 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 guess i don't even know what fallow ians is
- 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

Funny things if there was regular controlled fire, there would have none wildfire...
- 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.
  
  They already exist all over the western US. In AZ the majority of smokey days come from prescription burns or natural fires that the forest service manage like a prescribed burn
- 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.

I always knew Michigan was an unproductive POS /s

suburbs take up less place than i expected

Nice, guess I'm on team Food we eat!

Mmmm tobacco city.

I'd like to let you all know that I'm running for Senate in 2024 for the Idle/Fallow areas.
I promise to keep the status quo.

Uh where the hell are roads on this chart?
- Below cows. "Listed under cows" makes it sound like it's a subcategory of cows, which it isn't.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot “food we eat”?
Field corn and soybeans are STRICTLY for animal (specifically cow, pig sheep and chicken) consumption. Food we eat is from California.
- It doesn't represent state by state.
- yeah, I'm pretty sure there's some agriculture going on in California, which produces 50% of the nation's produce. Florida too ("landowning families" isn't a use?). Also we eat corn from the central Midwest, and lots of wheat from Dakotas and Minnesota.
  
  Don’t forget pumpkin! The Midwest produces much of the world’s pumpkin, I think Illinois alone makes about 85%, but I may be wrong on that figure.

I have to tell you, there's plenty of farmed land on the entire west coast this map does not depict. Less than half of the areas labeled timberlands are forested, as a generous estimate.
Edit: as the comments under this state, I just didn't understand what was being represented and how.
- 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.
  
  You’re very much right! About 30/50 of our states have a national park, and every state has state parks. For example, Nebraska has only 8, while California has a whopping 284! The mean though is 45.6, which is still quite high.
- I think the idea is, e.g. if farmed land would be a state what would be it's size?

I hate, hate, HATE this. It implies the main land-use is the only use. Do people in the Midwest simply commute 2,000 miles a day, since that's where the housing is? This belongs in c/UglyInaccurateData...
- 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!!!! /s
- Wow, look how much more land would be available if we just stopped eating cows!!!!

Central Texas is mostly used for defense? Since when? Everywhere I look around it’s tech.
- Apparently this doesn't show the locations of the separate industries, rather the landmass usage of said industries.
  
  Which means it’s a bad diagram.

That makes no sense for Michigan at all. I’d imagine Michigan land use is mostly forest (so much national forest/protected wetlands here), then agriculture, then urban space (Metro Detroit is most of this), then a little pasture. The only way “idle” makes sense to me is if any protected forest/natural land is considered “idle”
- 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.
  
  I know this map isn’t clearly broken down by state, which is (part of) why this map struggles to communicate what it’s trying to say IMO. I think the first map in the linked Bloomberg article (with land use data broken down on a more granular level) does a better job at communicating the same trends