Demographic Trends in Nonmetropolitan America: Implications for Land Use Development and Conservation.

This research contributes new information delineating the rapidity and geographic scale at which demographic change is occurring in non-metropolitan America. Rural areas are being buffeted by economic, social, and governmental transformations from far beyond their borders. These structural transformations are reflected in the demographic trends playing out across the vast rural landscape in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The patterns of demographic change in rural America are complex and subtle, but their impact is not. Population change has significant implications for the people, places, and institutions of rural America; for the natural environment that is a fundamental part of what rural America was, is, and will become; and for the laws and policies that seek to balance the rights of individuals with the needs of the larger society. This article examines the influence of demographic forces on non-metropolitan population redistribution trends in the U.S. in the first decade of the twenty-first century