Agricultural Land Use Mapping in Hawaii

Research on agricultural development and agrarian change will often, at one point or another, brush up against crop selections and the geography of production.

During a course on Quantitative Soil Carbon a couple years back I started pulling together data about crop land cover. This became a broader goal to build a spatial crop land cover timeline of the Hawaiian Islands.

While documentation of agricultural land use extends well back in text, few digital geospatial references are available for those interested in exploring crop land cover change.

The screenshot above is of an interactive timeline I made to chart the spatial extent and study date of a few such datasets. Live links will direct you to the data in a new window.

Compilation of a robust crop land use/land cover database through time can help inform or narrate understanding the geography of agricultural development and agrarian change in the Hawaiian islands.

Next step is to collate the crops listed in each and ferret out additional data.