746
Land use in the US
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
746 points (92.5% liked)
Data Is Beautiful
9 readers
179 users here now
A place to share and discuss data visualizations. #dataviz
(under new moderation as of 2024-01, please let me know if there are any changes you want to see!)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
It is absolutely blowing my mind how many people are looking at this and thinking that is trying to show, like, primary land use per block on the map or something?
Like it's well-known that maple syrup comes exclusively from northwest PA, plus all the logging that happens in downtown San Francisco and LA.
Every single home is in the northeast
Is this a glorified pie chart? Follow-up question: Why is this not just an actual pie chart?
the idea is to show that X land use consumes an area equivalent to an easily recognizable state-area
the added context of the US map gives it some utility that a pie chart, which is just straight trash, does not have
a bar graph or even just a table would convey similar information more precisely and usefully, but if your only goal is to give an intuitive sense of the land use (not writing policy or anything here) it suits
Pie charts are useless in general.
For the example shown here there are way too many categories for a pie chart. You would not be able to see anything past the top 3 or so categories as the slices get too thin and the labels would be all over the place.
Lastly you would miss out on the size comparisons to e.g. states.
This is much better.