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Data release for Accounting for Land in the United States: Integrating Physical Land Cover, Land Use, and Monetary Valuation

Metadata Updated: September 24, 2025

Land plays a critical role in both economic and environmental accounting. As an asset, it occupies a unique position at the intersection of the System of National Accounts (SNA), the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Central Framework (SEEA-CF), and (as a spatial unit) SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA), making land a natural starting point for developing natural capital accounts more generally. We develop a pilot set of national and sub-national land accounts for the United States that are consistent with the SEEA-CF and SNA principles, quantified in both physical and monetary terms. The physical accounts utilize detailed land use (National Land Use Database) and land cover (National Land Cover Database) datasets, which provide insights into how land cover in the U.S. is changing over time. To provide aggregate estimates of land values, we use a hedonic approach that exploits fine-grain microdata (“big data” from Zillow) that contains detailed information from hundreds of millions of property transactions and their corresponding physical characteristics covering much of the U.S. Methodologically, we show that it is feasible to produce monetary accounts for land that can be directly linked to and integrated with physical land cover/use. Overall, U.S. land cover has shown declines in forests, cropland, and pasture with increases in barren, scrub/shrub, and developed classes, which are particularly concentrated in the U.S. Southeast. Nominal land values in the U.S. fell about 28% from the boom to bust periods in the prior decade, albeit with substantial regional variation, and have subsequently experienced a nearly full recovery in recent years. We estimate private land in the contiguous 48 states to be worth approximately $35.5 trillion in 2016.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date September 14, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 24, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 14, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 24, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-5dd48081e4b0695797628972
Data Last Modified 2020-10-15T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id f0789248-000e-400a-8af0-dbf99c06e9b0
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -178.443606, 18.865464, -66.885443, 71.441059
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 5b4088f4a43cee1877cd2302e15a0c2e4be4219f35092d2423d3666849716930
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -178.443606, 18.865464, -178.443606, 71.441059, -66.885443, 71.441059, -66.885443, 18.865464, -178.443606, 18.865464}

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