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
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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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
Sick burn
Because everyone else is shitting on it - I just wanna let you know OP that I actually liked this map
"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.
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.
Rual, as in my lively hood is based on the land I live on/near or "rual" as in a suburb built in the green way, but I still do the rest of my work and living in the city?
Rural as in the nearest town with more than 30,000 people is 90 miles away.
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'd suggest a merger between '100 largest landowning families' and 'Food we eat'.
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.
Thanks for giving me a shitty graph and then a source to a paywalled article.
Here's non-paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20230316140810/https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
Anytime
uae bypass paywalls clean, works wonders on that website
How much is native reservations
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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!!!!
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.
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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
Nice, guess I'm on team Food we eat!
California also uses their lands for wildfires, they even have a fire season now. Don't forget to give credit where credit is due!
suburbs take up less place than i expected
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