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Show HN: I created this land use visualisation for the Netherlands

by vnglst on 6/6/24, 5:02 PM with 27 comments

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.

  • by mosselman on 6/8/24, 12:49 PM

    The 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-countrie...

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/276713/distribution-of-g...

    https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/25/the-netherlands-is-the...

    https://decorrespondent.nl/14856/goed-nieuws-de-groene-trans....

  • by niek_pas on 6/8/24, 10:20 AM

    Very 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.

  • by amelius on 6/8/24, 1:08 PM

    Advice: add a button that morphs the visualization to the situation where every hexagon is at/near the geographical location where it belongs.

  • by JoeAltmaier on 6/8/24, 11:25 AM

    Nice!

    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.

  • by tgv on 6/8/24, 10:25 AM

    Nice. I had definitely not expected agriculture in total to be over 50%.

  • by casper14 on 6/8/24, 12:41 PM

    Love it! Reallt shows how much land is used by agriculture

  • by jorisboris on 6/7/24, 6:51 AM

    Love the visualization

    Kinda confused with the meaning, there is more infrastructure than buildings?

    And there seems to be a massive amount of urban grass!

  • by hi-v-rocknroll on 6/9/24, 5:43 PM

    More corn % than America even.

    Pasture: Is all of that for grazing livestock or does that represent land without trees?

  • by karanveer on 6/9/24, 5:00 AM

    Damn, I wonder how it would have been to be born and raised in Netherlands...

  • by msoad on 6/8/24, 11:18 AM

    Almost 1% flowers!

  • by robbiejs on 6/7/24, 10:14 AM

    Beautiful work