Historical trends and projection of land use for South-Central United States

This report presents historical trends and future projections of forest, ag ricultural, and urban and other land uses for the South-Central United Stat es. A land use share model is used to investigate the relation between the areas of land in alternative uses and economic and demographic factors infl uencing land use decisions. Two different versions of the empirical model a re estimated, depending on the stumpage price series used to calculate net returns from forest land: model 1 uses sawtimber prices and model 2 uses pu lpwood price series. This leads to two sets of land use projections. We fou nd that landowners are more responsive to changes in pulpwood prices than t o those in sawtimber prices. The fitted econometric models were used to gen erate projections of future land use to 2050, given the projections on popu lation and assuming 0.5-percent annual stumpage price increases. Although t here were differences in magnitudes of changes, both sets of projections sh owed the same general trends of land use allocations over the next 50 years . The category urban and other land continuously increases owing to populat ion growth, and timberland expands owing to assumed stumpage price increase s. Agricultural land declines to compensate for the amount of increases of timberland and urban and other land.