Land Use Transformation Associated with US Agricultural Production

Abstract. Many studies in the food and agricultural sector in the United States have assumed that since the US agricultural landscape has been relatively stable for many decades, that land-use change is a relatively unimportant contributor to life cycle impacts of the food supply chain. In this work, we investigate land-use change in US agriculture using publicly available remotely sensed data. The major sources of information are the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) published by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium, which differentiates 16 land-use classes, of which 2 are agricultural. The second source of information is the Crop Data Layer (CDL) published by the USDA, which differentiates, at 30 m resolution, all the major crops produced in the US. Because of the high level of aggregation of the NLCD for agricultural use, we have focused on preliminary work on using the CDL to identify land changes over 8-year period (2008-2015). Our approach is to evaluate detailed crop level land-use change and then correlate this with data available from the NLCD, which has a longer history of nationwide coverage, and National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) data on crop areas to extrapolate the crop specific land transformation at national scale. Because the impacts of the reverse transformations do not fully offset the initial transformation, a detailed accounting such as enabled by this analysis will provide a better platform for the inclusion of land use change in biodiversity and ecosystem services assessments which are being discussed in the international community.