Who's your neighbor: Adding resolution to rural land use change

Abstract

Researchers at Duke University are working on a North Carolina Sea Grant project (R/BS-18): Changing Coastal Communities, Perspectives from Down East. The intent of this research is to better understand communities’ perceptions of land use change and development in eastern Carteret County, North Carolina. Building off this study, this paper seeks to expand our understanding by adding geospatial resolution to these data. My work is broken into two primary parts: (1) First, I develop a regional typology to describe the spatial composition of development across the landscape. (2) These data are then coupled with the study’s social survey data to examine the extent to which fine-scale patterns are tied to peoples’ attitudes. Results of this simple exercise highlight the heterogeneity that exists within rural landscapes and suggests that fine-scale ownership patterns affect peoples’ responses to land use change and development.