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The conversion of agricultural land to more-developed uses jeopardizes food security and ecosystem integrity. However, nationally consistent, high-resolution spatial data on agricultural land location and change have been largely unavailable. Through a project titled Farms Under Threat, American Farmland Trust and Conservation Science Partners mapped the extent of and change in agricultural lands within the conterminous U.S. between 2001 and 2016, producing layers that capture land cover/use and agricultural land productivity, versatility, and resiliency (PVR). This analysis used data from a number of sources, including USDA NRCS National Resources Inventory (NRI), USGS National Land Cover Database (NLCD), NRCS Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO), and NRCS Digital General Soil Map of the United States (STATSGO). These data provide an improvement over previous efforts by: harmonizing NRI’s ground-based estimates of agricultural land with NLCD remote sensing; mapping agricultural land conversion in a consistent way over time; and mapping new land- use classes including low-density residential, woodlands associated with farms, and grazing on federal lands. We found that, of the major land cover/use classes, agriculture dominates the continental US landscape. Yet, from 2001-2016, 11 million acres of agricultural land were converted from agriculture to more-developed land uses. Of these 11 million acres, more than 4 million were converted to urban and other highly developed (UHD) uses, while nearly 7 million acres went to low-density residential (LDR) land use. Compounding these impacts, 4.4 million acres of the nation’s highest-PVR lands were converted to UHD and LDR land uses. These trends are likely to continue, as agricultural land in LDR areas was 23 times more likely to be converted to UHD than other agricultural land. Additional findings from the analysis are available in the report (https://farmlandinfo.org/publications/farms-under-threat-the-state-of-the-states/) and on the website... |
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The conversion of agricultural land to more-developed uses jeopardizes food security and ecosystem integrity. However, nationally consistent, high-resolution spatial data on agricultural land location and change have been largely unavailable. Through a project titled Farms Under Threat, American Farmland Trust and Conservation Science Partners mapped the extent of and change in agricultural lands within the conterminous U.S. between 2001 and 2016, producing layers that capture land cover/use and agricultural land productivity, versatility, and resiliency (PVR). This analysis used data from a number of sources, including USDA NRCS National Resources Inventory (NRI), USGS National Land Cover Database (NLCD), NRCS Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO), and NRCS Digital General Soil Map of the United States (STATSGO). These data provide an improvement over previous efforts by: harmonizing NRI’s ground-based estimates of agricultural land with NLCD remote sensing; mapping agricultural land conversion in a consistent way over time; and mapping new land- use classes including low-density residential, woodlands associated with farms, and grazing on federal lands. We found that, of the major land cover/use classes, agriculture dominates the continental US landscape. Yet, from 2001-2016, 11 million acres of agricultural land were converted from agriculture to more-developed land uses. Of these 11 million acres, more than 4 million were converted to urban and other highly developed (UHD) uses, while nearly 7 million acres went to low-density residential (LDR) land use. Compounding these impacts, 4.4 million acres of the nation’s highest-PVR lands were converted to UHD and LDR land uses. These trends are likely to continue, as agricultural land in LDR areas was 23 times more likely to be converted to UHD than other agricultural land. Additional findings from the analysis are available in the report (https://farmlandinfo.org/publications/farms-under-threat-the-state-of-the-states/) and on the website... |
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Conservation Science Partners and American Farmland Trust |
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<DIV STYLE="text-align:Left;font-size:12pt"><DIV><P><SPAN>To address the ongoing need to improve understanding of agricultural land patterns and rates of change to inform land use planning and policymaking at relevant scales, American Farmland Trust and Conservation Science Partners worked together to classify land cover/use across the conterminous US, with a special focus on agricultural land. This effort provides several important improvements over existing data sources by harmonizing NRI estimates of agricultural land with available spatial data; mapping agricultural land use and conversion to development in a consistent way over time; identifying the most important agricultural lands in each state based on soil productivity, versatility and resiliency; accounting for effects of low-density residential development on agricultural lands; including a new class of agricultural lands that estimates woodlands associated with farms; and mapping grazing on federal lands.</SPAN></P></DIV></DIV> |
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AFT_AgLandConversion |
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en-US |
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