Logging is a major factor in converting western landscapes from useful habitat to something else. | Photo: pfly, some rights reserved
The Western United States lost a staggering amount of formerly natural land to human development between 2001 and 2011, enough to average the loss of a football fields worth of habitat every two and a half minutes. Thats according to a soon-to-be-released study by the Center for American Progress and Conservation Science Partners announced in an article posted on the blogging site Medium by the Center, which says it will be releasing a giant pile of data from the study in the weeks to come.
According to the study, the Western US - the 11 westernmost contiguous states excluding Alaska and Hawaii - lost more than 4,300 square miles of what it calls natural lands in that decade-long period to human development such as logging, mining, road-building and urban development. Thats an area bigger than Yellowstone National Park, as the Center points out.
And of all the eleven states studied, California lost the largest amount of natural land to development between 2001 and 2011. Californians sacrificed 784 square miles of natural landscape to human industry in that decade, an area just a hair smaller than Los Angeles and San Diego combined, almost a fifth of the total land lost across the West.
--
--
Thats a huge amount of land lost just in California. Comprehending the 3,535 square miles lost in the other ten states - Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming - fairly boggles the mind. To equal the acreage of converted natural land in the rest of the west wed have to take our comparison to Los Angeles and San Diego, above, and then add San Jose, Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Palm Springs, Lancaster, Riverside, Fremont, Apple Valley, and Victorville in California, then Phoenix and Tucson, Albuquerque and Las Cruces, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Colorado Springs, Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Butte, Montana.
Too hard to picture? How about this: Its an area larger than Los Angeles County. Its enough land to stretch from LA to Denver in a swath more than five miles wide.
Its a lot of land, and we developed it in one way or another within just 10 years.
Just what kinds of development are included in the study wont be clear until the Center for American Progress and Conservation Science Partners release more data, which they say they will be doing shortly:
Conservation Science Partners and the Center for American Progress will release the full results of the Disappearing West project in the coming weeks, including interactive maps and data about natural area loss at the state and county level.
But there are a couple of hints in the Medium piece. One is a straightforward statement of examples of the development theyve tracked, which they count at a dozen types of human activity:
Over the course of the decade, new human infrastructure in the West - including roads, mines, commercial and residential buildings, and logging operations - consumed an area bigger than Yellowstone National Park.
Another hint can be inferred from a teaser graphic included in the Medium piece, a map of the degree to which land in central California and a slice of western Nevada has been altered from its natural state:
Courtesy Center for American Progress and Conservation Science Partners
The largest blond areas in the map - the areas modified the least, according to the study - are found in the Coast Ranges, the Sierra Nevada, and the Great Basin Desert to the east of the Sierra. Much of the landscape in all those places has been grazed, sometimes intensively, for more than a century, with significant resulting changes in the landscape - erosion, loss of habitat for species like the sage grouse, and influx of invasive species.
Given the way the study examined the vast landscape of the West - through comparing datasets and aerial and satellite photography - its perhaps not surprising that grazing might not have made the list of those dozen types of human activity. Itll be interesting to see how that most widespread of all resource extraction industries gets mentioned in the study.
The study itself got some incredibly prominent mention scant hours after the Medium story was published Tuesday morning. At 11:00 Pacific Time, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell cited the study twice in the course of a speech at the National Geographic Society in which she called for a conservation course correction, primarily aimed at making sure the National Parks have continuing public support in the century ahead.
After talking about ways to make the parks more attractive to a younger, more diverse range of potential visitors and supporters, Jewell said:
The second course correction we need to make is to think big. It's simply not enough to protect a few isolated places. The same analysis I cited earlier by Conservation Science Partners found that, if you were to randomly drop a pin in a natural area in the West, on average it'd be only 3.5 miles from some form of human development. Think about that. That's a great statistic if you're a lost hiker looking to be rescued. But it has highly alarming implications for the mule deer or the grizzly bear who need connected corridors of land to survive.
And for desert bighorn sheep, for that matter, like those whose migration paths will be truncated by the Soda Mountain Solar facility recently green-lighted by the Interior Department on a tract of mostly unaltered natural habitat right next to the Mojave National Preserve.
In the Medium article, the Center for American Progress pointed out that the studys maps, when made available, may well serve as a useful tool to identify intact migration corridors like those the deer, bear, and sheep require.
For example, these data and m
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Logging is a major factor in converting western landscapes from useful habitat to something else. | Photo: pfly, some rights reserved 
