The Texas A&M Institute of Renewable Natural Resources has recently added a new interactive Web tool to its Texas Land Trends website, http://txlandtrends.org, allowing users to access land-use information released in 2014, according to an institute official.
“This new Web tool allows users to interact with the data to view land trends across Texas for user-defined areas,” said Amy Snelgrove, institute program coordinator.
Snelgrove said users can view 15-year trends in private working lands for such metrics as land use, market value, ownership size and population by county, river basin, eco-region or region of interest.
They can also choose different regional areas to make side-by-side comparisons of different metrics used.
Dr. Roel Lopez said the interactive data in Texas Land Trends provides public and private decision makers with information needed to plan for the conservation of these vital working lands.
“Texas Land Trends is a critically important data source for policymakers, conservation organizations, state agencies and federal agencies in terms of looking at what is happening to our land base in Texas,” he said.
Data sources used to build this interactive tool included Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts property tax/value data, which provided an annual compilation of land use and land value data from 1,021 independent school districts.
Other data sources included the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service Census of Agriculture data from 1997 to 2012 and Texas Department of State Health Services census population data. Texas Land Trends was developed in cooperation with Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service and Texas Agricultural Land Trust.