Comparing Alabama in terms of conserved land

One of my first assignments at The Public Affairs Research Council was to write about the upcoming vote on the state's land preservation program, Forever Wild. Approval of the measure labeled Amendment 1 on the November ballot would extend Forever Wild for another 20 years.
A more extensive discussion of that amendment and others can be found in PARCA's Analysis of Proposed Statewide Amendments for the November 6th General Election.

To put Forever Wild in a regional context I produced a few maps and charts that might be of interest.
Here's a map comparing conservation land among Southeastern states. The information is drawn from the Conservation Almanac published by the Trust for Public Land. Their most current survey data is for 2005.
Alabama ranks last in the Southeast on all measures: acres preserved, acres preserved per capita, and percentage of total area preserved.




There are significant differences in land conservation among the various regions of the U.S. with a lot more public land having been preserved out west and a much smaller amount in the more densely populated Mid-Atlantic states.

So sticking with the Southeast region, here are a few ways of looking at the amount of land preserved in the Southeastern states in comparison with each other. You'll notice that state's like Florida and Arkansas with large national forests or national parks rank higher. But several states have been aggressive in recent years in land conservation, particularly Florida.




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