Data Is Beautiful

Why? It gives people a relatable size and shape to compare to. Like saying the 100 richest landowners own equivalent to Florida.

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.

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

I like seeing the area.

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.

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

!fuck_cars@lemmy.ml is leaking.

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 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.

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.

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?

Urban-commercial

Every single home is in the northeast

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.

They're a timber company

This doesn't show where these uses are located on a map, just the area of land relative to the total country.

The original article does specify contiguous US.