NCRS - The Changing Midwest Assessment

The seven Midwestern States that make up the North Central Region cover more than 267 million acres. These lands are typically classified into six major land cover types: Agriculture, Forestland, Urban, Nonforest Wetland, Water, and Barren.

This slide show consists of a series of maps depicting how the area and spatial distribution of land classified as Urban changed from 1980 to 2000.

Change in the area of land classified as Urban was calculated at a resolution of 1 km using aerial photography and satellite imagery (see Bergen, Brown, Rutherford, and Gustafson, 2002).