Using
survey field notes, aerial photographs, and statistical
compilations, Francis
Marschner
created the first authoritative medium-scale U.S. land use
map in 1950. This version of the map, published in 1958,
depicts twelve categories of land use, ranging from cropland
and pastureland
to desert and marshland. The heir to Marschner’s work
at ERS is the Major Uses of
Land in the United States, 1997.
These days we are used to seeing land use imagery from space,
with computers receiving and collating billions of bits of data
from satellites in a single pass over the continent. Francis Marschner,
a USDA geographer in both the Bureau of Agricultural Economics
(BAE) and Economic Research Service, went about it the hard way
in the 1920s and 1930s. By painstakingly consulting survey field
notes, aerial photographs, and statistical compilations, he fashioned
continental scale maps of land use. This pioneering work established
the interdisciplinary approach to land use research in BAE and
ERS that informed conservation and land development programs at
the Federal and State level, and expanded cartographic methods
for depicting economic and physical data.
Born in Austria in 1882, Marschner studied at the Cartographic
Institute in Berlin, before immigrating to the United States in
1915. His work at USDA began with the Atlas of American Agriculture,
published between 1922 and 1936. In 1945, he began work on Major
Land Uses in the United States, published in 1950, which contained
the first authoritative medium-scale U.S. land use map, printed
in the National Atlas of the United States. The Major
Land Uses series has been published every 5 years ever since,
and is still the only comprehensive picture of all land uses for
the U.S. prepared by the Federal government. The Association of
American Geographers awarded this work its citation for meritorious
work, the hallmark of Marschner’s career.
Another major work was Land Use Patterns in the United States,
a collection of 168 aerial photographs depicting the variety of
landforms across America. Marschner received USDA’s Superior
Accomplishment Award in 1947, and in 1963 was elected a fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Marschner retired from USDA’s BAE in 1952, but continued
to work under a special unpaid joint appointment in ERS and USDA’s
Agricultural Research Service, walking nearly 7 miles to work each
day. Marschner never married and had no relatives in the country,
but, according to the Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
he had “the devotion of his ‘family’ of friends
in the Department of Agriculture.” He died on January 31,
1966, walking to work at age 83.
