Giant urban sprawl could pave over thousands of acres of Southeast forest and agricultural lands, connecting Raleigh to Atlanta by 2060, if growth continues at its current pace, according to a newly released research paper from the U.S. Geological Survey.
“We could be looking at a seamless corridor of urban development,” said Adam Terando, a research ecologist with the USGS and an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University who was the study’s lead author.
The development will engulf land from North Carolina to Georgia, and possibly spread to Birmingham, Ala., “if we continue to develop urban areas in the Southeast the way we have for the past 60 years,” he said.
Combining USGS demographic modeling with North Carolina State’s High Performance Computing Services and analyzing the data for six years, Terando and his five co-authors estimated that urbanization in the Southeast will increase by up to 190 percent. It will nearly mirror the decades-old development of the Northeast corridor, from Washington to Boston, Terando said, and in Florida from Jacksonville to Miami. “I would say that’s definitely a future that the study is pointing toward,” he said.
Development on that scale would result in losses of 15 percent of agricultural land, 12 percent of grasslands and 10 percent of forests, the study said. It would take the form of tract housing developments, business centers and thousands of miles of paved roads.