A pair of SUNY-ESF professors have mapped out how land across the country has been developed and used over the last several decades.

Georgios Mountrakis, an associate professor at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and George Grekousis, a post-doctoral associate, aimed to compare how developed land in different counties across the country compares to that of counties with similar populations. Their research was released on March 25 and can be used to see which counties are more energy efficient compared to others.

The two professors used satellite data available at the national scale that was derived by the U.S. Geological Survey and aggregated that data for every county to identify how much developed land has been used.

They then used data obtained by the U.S. Census Bureau to discover the population of each county. Once they established the primary data set, the two began to investigate different facets and relationships within the data.

In order to make a fair comparison, they separated all counties into metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas and found the 100 counties within each group with the closest populations. They observed how much land each was consuming and ranked each county based on that. The lower the ranking, the less the county is consuming. Conversely, the higher the ranking, the more land the county was consuming for its population size.


The first goal of the research was to discover which counties were over and under-performers in terms of consumption. The next step was, after identifying those counties, focusing specifically on the extreme over and under-performers.

“Within those counties, we tried to see if there were changes to be made in terms of their socio-economic composition,” Mountrakis said.

Their research indicated that low-income counties tend to consume less developed land per capita. Mountrakis said that from a policy perspective, this research would allow policymakers to focus their attention on those counties and dive in and get more localized data as to why this may be happening.

The study was done from an environmental perspective, which suggests that the lower the consumption of developed land, the better for the environment, Mountrakis said. However, that does not necessarily mean that is it better for the occupants of the county, as it may suggest that they are missing essential infrastructure, he added.

“That does not mean that we should go to the extreme of under-consuming,” Mountrakis said, “but this allows us to start raising those questions that we didn’t know where to start from before.”

Mountrakis said this is the first step to start a greater discussion of land consumption at the national scale, which he hopes propagates to discussions about regional and local land use.

“We’re trying to quantify the changes that are happening in the environment and the next step is trying to understand those changes so that we can all chip in and contribute to environmental sustainability,” Mountrakis said.

The two researchers created a YouTube video to allow users to identify how their own county ranked. For example, Onondaga County ranks 45th among counties with similar population sizes.

Mountrakis said that he picked up this specific research because he was intrigued by the fact that not only were they doing a geographic analysis on a large scale, but that they were able to take it one step further and look into socio-economic linkages. They were trying to find the balance between the environment and human consumption, he said.

“We developed the mathematical model that’s in the paper and at the same time we tried to see the effect that it has on human composition,” Mountrakis said.