Land Use Lesson 6 : Analyzing Agricultural Land Use Changes : Country
Extensions
1. Creating a Community Land Use Profile.
Tell students that within counties are communities—townships, towns, and cities that have governments and are concerned with land use, just as counties and states are. In this activity, students will focus on two communities; tell students which two communities you have selected, but do not characterize the communities as urban, suburban, or rural. (Data are provided for three communities: Community Data Sheet 1: Dexter (Rural); Community Data Sheet 2: Utica (Suburban); and Community Data Sheet 3: Ypsilanti (Urban)).
Locate the three communities on the Human World, Michigan County Map. Organize the students into groups of four. Give each group the data sheets for the two communities you have selected. Using the 2008 data for each community, ask students to speculate whether the community is rural, suburban, or urban. For example, if more than 50% of the land is agricultural, then it most likely is a rural community. In a brief guided discussion, help students explain the characteristics of a community that classify it as rural, suburban, or urban based on land use.
Assign each student within a group one year and one community to construct a land use pie graph for that community and year using the percentages provided on the Community Data Sheets. The result will be four pie graphs in each group, one for each community for each year. You may need to review pie graphing. If computers are available and students are familiar with Excel, the pie graphing could be done on the computer.
Review the completed graphs for accuracy. Then distribute the Comparing Two Michigan Communities student activity page and ask students to use their graphs to identify how the two communities were similar in 2002 and in 2008. They should then interpret the graphs to determine how the communities were different in 2002 and 2008.
Select groups of students to discuss and present their graphs and the interpretations they wrote. Use a guided discussion to summarize the comments. Emphasize the changes that are occurring in the various types of communities: the change is small in urban areas, where the agricultural land is already gone; the changes are greater in suburban and rural communities, both of which are losing agricultural land.
Ask students to consider why information about community land use would be important to the following people:
A community official? [They need to know what is happening with land in the community so they can make smart land use decisions that will serve the common good.]
A person who wants to start a business in a community? [They can get an idea of whether people are moving to the community and thus there will be a market for their product; if the business takes a lot of land, they need to know if land is available.]
A person who wants to live close to the natural environment? [They can determine how much open land still exists in the community.]
2. Creating a Grid Map of Community Land Use.
If you did not use the above Enhancement, begin by telling students that within counties are communities—townships, towns, and cities that have governments and are concerned with land use, just as counties and states are. In this activity, they are going to learn one way to show land use in a community. If you did use the above enhancement, begin by asking students if they can think of another way, in addition to pie charts, that a community’s land use profile could be shown. If no one suggests mapping, suggest that there is a special kind of map that shows land uses in a community so that the map reader can tell the amount of land devoted to different uses. It is called a grid map. It shows how much of the total land a certain land use takes up.
If students do not already have the land use information for the communities, distribute the data sheets for the two communities you selected. Also give each group of four students four copies of the Land Use Grid.
Use an overhead transparency of the Land Use Grid to demonstrate the process of grid mapping. Since there are 100 cells on the grid and the land use data are in percentages, the mapping is one cell for each percent of land use in a community. Thus, if agriculture uses 10 percent of the land, students would color 10 squares with the color they have chosen for agriculture (they might also use a symbol of some type, such as a house for residential areas).
Interpretation of the grid maps will be easier if all students use the same symbols/colors, so you may wish to decide on the symbols as a group. Instruct students to map their land uses together as clusters, so that the entire residential area is together. A good way to do this is to begin with the largest land use category first; students should begin their grid in the upper left hand corner and work down, filling in the first row, and then go back to the top and fill in the second row, and so on across the grid. In their groups of four, assign each student to map one year for one of the two communities. The result will be four different grid maps.
Analyze the changes that occurred in land use. For example, students may conclude that a community became less agricultural and more residential during that period (Dexter), that little change occurred (Ypsilanti), or that business in a community grew (Utica).