I've always thought the United States to be filled with sprawling cities since that's what I grew up in and saw one T.V. It wasn’t until my family and I moved my sister into college that I saw the vast open landscapes of north-central Texas. This got me wondering how much land in our country is actually urban and made this research very interesting to me.
Here we analyze the distribution of land use in the United States from data, spanning from 1945-2017, on a state, regional, and national level. With the United States 3.8 million square miles of land, it's surprising that 82% of the population lives in our urban areas which only make up 2.01% of the total land in the country. It is nice to see that green areas (forests, croplands, and grasslands) make up most of the country. While much of this is preserved through federal protections or maintained as farmland, it’s encouraging to see that, despite ongoing urban creep, much of the country’s natural landscape remains intact.