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Show HN: I created this land use visualisation for the Netherlands
Last weekend, I tried creating an original visualization of something on many minds in my home country the Netherlands: land use.
Much of our discussion revolves around land use—housing crisis, sustainable farming, solar energy—it's all about the land. To illustrate this, I created a map where each hexagon represents 0.06% (26,647 hectares) of land in the Netherlands. The color indicates the type of land use.
- jorisboris 2y agoLove the visualization Kinda confused with the meaning, there is more infrastructure than buildings? And there seems to be a massive amount of urban grass!
- vnglst 2y agoThanks Joris! According the the Wageningen University report there is! It's small road, highways but also rail road tracks. The actual report can be found here: https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/landelijk-grondgebruiksbestand-nederland-2021-lgn2021-achtergrond https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/landelijk-grondgebru... This also contains the definitions of land use categories. I've grouped all of the above (roads, rail, highways) under infrastructure.
- jules 2y agoFrom reading the description, perhaps "urban greenery" would be a better term than "urban grass".
- tinco 2y agoIt makes sense if you think about it. I live in a relatively dense neighbourhood, and if you consider the infrastructure my building and the building across from me share, two sidewalks and a street, it's already almost as much area as the footprint of our buildings. Add to that large buildings that often have huge paved areas around them, and highways which are extremely wide and stretch for hundreds of kilometers, it's easy to see that there will be more infrastructure than buildings. With regards to the grass, even though I live in the city I already have as much garden ("urban grass") as I have building footprint. I wonder if they include other garden vegetation as "urban grass" as well, but maybe it's not significant in comparison?
- robbiejs 2y agoBeautiful work
- tgv 2y agoNice. I had definitely not expected agriculture in total to be over 50%.
- niek_pas 2y agoVery nice visualization! Tiny feature request: would be nice if I could hover over the items in the legend at the top left to highlight them on the map as well. I'm surprised at the small amount of 'urban area' for such a 'volgebouwd' country.
- msoad 2y agoAlmost 1% flowers!
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoNice! Kinda confused, using a map to represent land area, then the colored hex locations are not corresponding to the land use they indicate. I get it, some of the hexes are 'all over', like solar. Can't put that one hex any one place. Just remarking that it gave me pause - mixing land-use-geography with ... geography. Without being correlated in any way.
- nkrisc 2y agoIt is really strange and ends up obscuring the relationships between quantities. It is a pretty visualization that unfortunately fails its primary purpose. I would recommend to the author the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte.
- hobofan 2y ago> ends up obscuring the relationships between quantities It can end up obscuring relationships between quantities internal to the visualization, but at the same time having this kind of visualization can help tie the internal quantities to external quantities known to the reader. E.g. "4% of land mass of Netherlands" may not mean much to someone, but if they can see it visualized on a map like this can help them recognize that it's equivalent to e.g. "this county I'm living in".
- hubraumhugo 2y agoA treemap would probably be the better choice. The Swiss government uses one to visualize their land use: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/territory-environment/land-use-cover.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/territory-en...
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- casper14 2y agoLove it! Reallt shows how much land is used by agriculture
- mosselman 2y agoThe agricultural land use in the Netherlands always triggers me. More than 50% of the Netherlands is used for agriculture, yet it only makes up about 1.5% of our GDP. At the same time we are the world’s second biggest exporter of agricultural goods in the world. Mainly meat to Germany, Italy and China. All that environmental sacrifice for a few farmers and food for other countries. Instead we could have better air, nicer and bigger pieces of nature, etc. Another fun fact is that one tile is solar panels which are more than all of the solar panels in the whole of Africa. Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332329/leading-countries-worldwide-by-value-of-agricultural-products-exported/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332329/leading-countrie... https://www.statista.com/statistics/276713/distribution-of-gross-domestic-product-gdp-across-economic-sectors-in-the-netherlands/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/276713/distribution-of-g... https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/25/the-netherlands-is-the-eu-s-largest-meat-exporter https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/25/the-netherlands-is-the... https://decorrespondent.nl/14856/goed-nieuws-de-groene-transitie-gaat-in-nederland-keihard-nu-de-rest-van-de-wereld-nog/5e12fe2f-d0a7-07ac-392a-393f6048c80e#:~:text=Geen%20enkel%20EU%2Dland%20wekt,zonnepanelen%20opgesteld%20dan%20heel%20Afrika https://decorrespondent.nl/14856/goed-nieuws-de-groene-trans....
- snapplebobapple 2y agoI guess you should save up your eurosand buy some farm land to convert to nature.
- xandrius 2y agoYou're not counting in the tulip industry, which googling returns a whooping 10% of the GDP.
- amelius 2y agoAdvice: add a button that morphs the visualization to the situation where every hexagon is at/near the geographical location where it belongs.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- karanveer 2y agoDamn, I wonder how it would have been to be born and raised in Netherlands...
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoMore corn % than America even. Pasture: Is all of that for grazing livestock or does that represent land without trees?