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Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2007

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By Cynthia Nickerson, Robert Ebel, Allison Borchers, and Fernando Carriazo

Economic Information Bulletin No. (EIB-89) 67 pp, December 2011

The United States has a total land area of nearly 2.3 billion acres. In 2007, the major land uses were forestland at 671 million acres (30 percent); grassland pasture and rangeland at 614 million (27 percent); cropland at 408 million (18 percent); special uses (primarily parks and wildlife areas) at 313 million acres (14 percent); miscellaneous uses (like tundra or swamps) at 197 million acres (9 percent); and urban land at 61 million acres (3 percent). This report presents findings from the most recent (2007) inventory of U.S. major land uses, drawing on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, public land management and conservation agencies, and other sources. The data are synthesized by State to estimate the use of several broad classes and subclasses of agricultural and nonagricultural land over time. National and regional trends in land use are compared with earlier major land-use estimates.

Keywords: Land use, land-use change, agricultural land, nonagricultural land, cropland, forest-use land, forestland, pasture, rangeland, rural residential land, urban land, ERS, USDA

In this report ...

Chapters are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

Charts and graphs (in .png format) from this report are available in the .zip file listed below. The .zip file also contains a document (readme.txt) that lists the name and title of each chart or graph file.

Data files

  • The Major Land Uses data set provides acreage estimates of major uses by region and States in roughly 5-year increments from 1945 through 2007. Data are available in Excel.

Updated date: December 19, 2011

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