Fascinating Maps Isolate America’s Trees, Corn, and Grass

Unless you grew up in the middle of America, it’s hard to fathom just how much of our country is covered in corn. If you’re looking for numbers, we’ve got 91 million acres of cornfields that take up nearly 5 percent of our nation’s land. But to get an idea of what that really means, it’s probably best to look at Michael Pecirno’s map.
In Minimal Maps, Pecirno creates a series of images that chart various features of the U.S landscape. The designer, currently getting his masters at the Royal College of Art, plumbed the USDA’s Cropscape datasets and isolated particular crops and plants to paint a series of unique, specific portraits of the country.

Michael Pecirno

You’ll notice corn is concentrated as a massive blob in the center of the U.S., extending slightly to the east. Contrast that to shrub land, largely a hallmark of the southwest, which creates a gaping hole in the middle of the country that’s filled by corn and grass. Evergreen forests, while densest in the northwest U.S., are more ubiquitous than you might imagine, as shown in the patch in the southeast. And grassland is by far our country’s most common feature, with enough data to fill in an almost complete coastline.
Pecirno’s maps skew a little abstract. “There’s something I quite like about them not being entirely contextual,” he says. With corn especially, it’s difficult to parse what you’re looking at. At a more granular level, though, you can begin to notice patterns in how individual states allocate land use. You see it in the subtle border created by grasslands in Missouri, the outline of Iowa defined by corn, Louisiana’s waterways.
The project pays clear homage to Fathom’s All Streets and Nelson Minar’s All Rivers, though Pecirno’s maps tell a slightly different story. While All Streets and All Rivers’ granular visualizations are designed to be combed through slowly and meticulously, Pecirno’s project is most interesting when you step back and look at the shapes and patterns that emerge on a nation-wide scale.