What Is Land Use?

Land use represents activities that have the potential to transform the landscape – land use is a process. Land cover on the other hand is the resulting pattern. For example, crops, orchards, subdivisions, and forests are land covers resulting from land use activities such as farming, developing housing, and conserving forests. We generally use the term land use when considering activities happening over large amounts of space, say in acres or square miles rather than in square feet (although scientists would be more likely to use the metric system, so hectares and square kilometers).

It Is Dynamic

Most of us can point to major changes in the landscapes around where we live. A dominant change between 1990 and 2010 has been the boom in housing developments. These new sprawling subdivisions include large lots and spreading road systems, eating up lots of land to provide relatively low density housing. Very different but just as dramatic changes have happened in the past. Few realize, for example, that much of the northeastern US forests were cut over by the late 1800’s, making way for pastures at a time when wool and dairy prices were high.

Many reasons are behind land use changes, most notably real estate, commodity, and energy prices. The value landowners get in return for certain activities on their land will, to a certain extent, dictate what they will do with it. Understanding economics is often the key to understanding observed land use changes.

It Has Important Environmental Effects

We share the land with a wide array of plants and animals that each have specific habitat requirements.

Our use of the land sometimes is in conflict with wildlife habitat. Our roads and subdivisions cut elk migrations corridors. Our large agricultural expanses of corn and soy don’t have hedges and windbreaks anymore, leaving no sanctuary for wild bees. It also favors some species: brown-headed cowbirds no longer follow buffalo herds in the tall-grass prairie, but instead they now flourish across the North American continent, tagging alongside cattle. The conversion of wildlife habitat through land use also leads to habitat fragmentation, where habitat is broken up into smaller fragments.

Land use has very important effects on climate change, especially when considering the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, the most important greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Clearing land and plowing it releases a lot of CO₂, contributing to warming. Tree plantations, natural forests, shrublands, and grasslands pick up CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Fortunately in the United States the regrowth of forests means that since the 1990s more CO₂ is taken out of the atmosphere than released into it by CO₂-generating land uses. When only looking at land use, the US is a carbon sink, which is good. However, carbon emissions from other sectors like energy production, industry, and transportation, outweigh the “carbon-catching” benefits we get from land use. In fact, only about 15% of our total emissions are balanced out by the amount of carbon our landscapes take out of the atmosphere.

It Will Continue Changing

It’s difficult to predict what the future will bring in terms of land use changes, but some important drivers already in motion will certainly continue to significantly alter the landscapes we live and work in. The energy sector is likely to increasingly alter open spaces. New approaches to natural gas and oil extraction will continue to create a large footprint of drilling pads, access roads, and pipelines. In parallel, our interest in renewable energy will transform very large areas as wind farms and solar energy sites are developed, both on private and on public lands. Finally, new ways of thinking about food and how to grow it will transform farmlands. This includes farms that have a diverse array of crops with smaller footprints and which rely on preserving some small patches of wild habitat adjacent to the cultivated areas. These tangled banks and hedges preserve habitat for the beast responsible for pollination and pest control.