The leading threat to species globally is habitat loss and degradation due to land use. A key to reducing this threat is identifying the extent to which individuals and nations contribute to it, which activities contribute most to the problem, and which offer the greatest potential for remediation. The focus of this study is to do precisely this for the USA by quantifying the country’s total domestic land footprint (total land area heavily impacted by human land use), subdivided into major land use categories. 2012 was selected as the year for assessment as it is the most recent for which comprehensive data were available for all major land uses. Data were obtained from the following sources: 2012 Natural Resources Inventory; National Land Cover Database (NLCD); National Land Use Database (NLUD); 2012 Census of Agriculture; Forest Resources of the United States 2012; Grazing Statistical Summary FY2012; USDA Bioenergy Statistics; USDA Soy Yearbook 2012; USDA Feed Grain Yearbook 2012; USDA Wheat Data 2012; and the USDI Fiscal Year 2012 Rangeland Inventory, Monitoring, and Evaluation Report. Developed lands were partitioned into subcategories by overlaying the NLUD land use map with the NLCD land cover map using ArcGIS 10.3.
Results/Conclusions
The total US land footprint in 2012 was 5,345,304 km2 or 66% of contiguous US land area. As a percent of contiguous US land area, the five largest footprint subcategories were biofuels (3%), non-agriculture development (4%), wood/fiber (4%), plant-based food (6%), and meat/animal products (50%). Thus, the US land footprint of animal product consumption is three times that of all other land uses combined. Given recent research showing meat requires 5-143 times more land per unit of protein produced, no other action has a greater potential to reduce America’s land footprint than ending or reducing meat consumption.