Center for Land Use Interpretation facts for kids

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (often called CLUI) is a non-profit group in the United States. It studies and helps people understand how we use the land around us. CLUI was started in 1994. It creates exhibits, special programs, and trips to interesting places. It also has a huge online collection of information. All this helps people learn about how humans change the Earth's surface.

What CLUI Wants to Do

CLUI's main goal is to "share knowledge about how our country's land is divided, used, and seen." This means they want everyone to understand how land is used and why.

What CLUI Does

CLUI creates many projects and programs. They make exhibits, do research, and host public events. These projects look at all sorts of land uses in the U.S. This includes land used for farming, energy, factories, mining, and even places for trash. They also study land used for water, transportation, shops, homes, fun, and defense.

CLUI makes special exhibits about how land is used in the U.S. They show these exhibits at their own places and at other museums. CLUI also creates books, online tools, tours, and talks across the country. You can read about what CLUI does in their yearly newsletter, The Lay of the Land. It's available both in print and online.

CLUI's main office is in Los Angeles. Here, they have a display area that anyone can visit. They also have other sites around the U.S. One is in Wendover, Utah, at a former military base. Another is the Desert Research Station in Hinkley, California.

CLUI is also leading the way to create the American Land Museum. This will be a group of exhibit sites in different parts of the country. Together, these sites will show a full picture of how our national landscape is used. It helps us understand who we are and what we are doing.

CLUI also organizes public trips to interesting and unusual land use sites. These trips are written about in the book, Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Online Information

CLUI has an online collection of "unusual and important" land use sites in the United States. This collection is called their database. The database has pictures taken by CLUI members. These pictures are from the CLUI Photo Archive.

You can also find the Morgan Cowles Archive on the CLUI website. This is an online collection of themed photos. It has over 100,000 pictures from thousands of places. These photos were taken by many different CLUI participants over the years. This archive exists thanks to money given by the family and friends of Morgan Cowles, in his memory.

See also

• Cultural landscape
• Sense of place

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