Land plays a critical role in both economic and environmental accounting. As an asset, it occupies a unique position at the intersection of the System of National Accounts (SNA), the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Central Framework (SEEA-CF), and (as a spatial unit) SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA), making land a natural starting point for developing natural capital accounts more generally. We develop a pilot set of national and subnational land accounts for the United States that are consistent with the SEEA-CF and SNA principles, quantified in both physical and monetary terms. The physical accounts utilize detailed land use (National Land Use Database) and land cover (National Land Cover Database) datasets, which provide insights into how land cover in the U.S. is changing over time. To provide aggregate estimates of land values, we use a hedonic approach that exploits fine-grain microdata (“big data” from Zillow) that contains detailed information from hundreds of millions of property transactions and their corresponding physical characteristics covering much of the U.S. Methodologically, we show that it is feasible to produce monetary accounts for land that can be directly linked to and integrated with physical land cover/use. Overall, U.S. land cover has shown declines in forests, cropland, and pasture with increases in barren, scrub/shrub, and developed classes, which are particularly concentrated in the U.S. Southeast. Nominal land values in the U.S. fell about 28% ($7 trillion) from the boom to bust periods in the prior decade, albeit with substantial regional variation, and have subsequently experienced a nearly full recovery in recent years. We estimate private land in the contiguous 48 states to be worth approximately $25.1 trillion in 2016.

土地在经济和环境核算中都起着至关重要的作用。作为一项资产，它在国民核算体系（SNA），环境经济核算中央框架（SEEA-CF）和（作为空间单位）SEEA实验生态系统核算（SEEA）的交叉点上占有独特的位置。 -EEA），使土地成为更广泛地发展自然资本账户的自然起点。我们为美国制定了一套试点的国家和地方以下的土地账目，这些账目与SEEA-CF和SNA原则一致，并以实物和货币形式进行了量化。实物账户利用详细的土地使用（国家土地使用数据库）和土地覆盖（国家土地覆盖数据库）数据集，可提供有关美国土地覆盖如何随着时间变化的见解。为了提供土地价值的总体估算，我们使用享乐方法，利用细粒度的微数据（Zillow的“大数据”）包含来自亿万房地产交易的详细信息及其相应的物理特征，涵盖了美国大部分地区，我们表明，为可以与土地实际覆盖/使用直接关联并整合在一起的土地建立货币账户是可行的。总体而言，美国的土地覆盖面积显示出森林，农田和牧场的减少，其中贫瘠，灌木丛/灌木和发达的土地类别增加，尤其集中在美国东南部。在过去的十年中，从繁荣时期到萧条时期，美国名义土地价值下降了约28％（7万亿美元），尽管地区差异很大，并且在最近几年中经历了几乎完全的恢复。我们估计2016年连续48个州的私有土地价值约为25.1万亿美元。