Historical Trends and Projections of Land Use for the South-Central United States

摘要

This report presents historical trends and future projections of forest,agricultural, and urban and other land uses for the South-Central United States. A land use share model is used to investigate the relation between the areas of land in alternative uses and economic and demographic factors influencing land use decisions. Two different versions of the empirical model are estimated, depending on the stumpage price series used to calculate net returns from forest land: model 1 uses sawtimber prices and model 2 uses pulpwood price series. This leads to two sets of land use projections. We found that landowners are more responsive to changes in pulpwood prices than to those in sawtimber prices. The fitted econometric models were used to generate projections of future land use to 2050, given the projections on population and assuming 0.5-percent annual stumpage price increases. Although there were differences in magnitudes of changes, both sets of projections showed the same general trends of land use allocations over the next 50 years. The category urban and other land continuously increases owing to population growth, and timberland expands owing to assumed stumpage price increases.