In this repository I calculate National Land Cover Database (NLCD) land cover class frequencies over US census tract geographies and join those frequencies to American Community Survey (ACS) data (also over US census tracts) over time. Specifically I join the 2011, 2013, and 2016 NLCD layers to the respective ACS 5-year survey data. This joint dataset allows for analysis of land cover and socioeconomic data. For example, we can calculate the correlation between the fraction of "Developed High Intensity" land in a census tract and the median income of that tract in urbanized counties:
To avoid having to download all raw data and compute the NLCD to ACS Census Tract join, download the processed.zip file and unzip it into the data/ directory. As a sanity check, after you do this, the file data/processed/acs_5yr_2011_nlcd_joined_data.csv should exist.
- Rural-Urban Continuum Codes - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes.aspx
- National Land Cover Database - https://www.mrlc.gov/data
- American Community Survey 5-year data - https://www.socialexplorer.com/
- Census Tract geographices - https://geodata.socialexplorer.com/