A Multiscale Spatial Dataset for Policy-Driven Land Developability across the United States, 2001–2011

Abstract. Land vulnerability and development can be restricted by both land policy and geophysical limits. Land vulnerability and development cannot be simply quantified by land cover/use change, because growth related to population dynamics is not horizontal. Particularly, time-series data with a higher flexibility considering the ability of land to be developed should be used to identify areas of spatiotemporal change. By considering the policy aspects of land development, this approach will allow one to further identify the lands facing population stress, socioeconomic burdens, and health risks. Here the concept of “land developability” is expanded to include policy-driven factors and land vulnerability to better reconcile developability with socio-environmental justice. The first phrase of policy-driven land developability mapping is implemented in estimating land information across the contiguous United States in 2001, 2006, and 2011. Multiscale data products for state-, county- and census-tract-levels are provided from this estimation. The extension of this approach can be applied to other countries with modifications for their specific scenarios. The data generated from this work are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AMZMWH (Chi and Ho, 2019).