[Imports] Forest Cover Data

Pavel Machek pavel at ucw.cz
Mon Oct 20 09:12:57 UTC 2014


Hi!

> > I just stumbled over
> > http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest
> >
> > More info under
> > http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest/dow
> >nload.html
> 
> Independent from the license the tree cover data is not suited for 
> import into OSM for multiple reasons:
> 
> - the data shows percentage of tree cover which is something OSM does 
> not map.  OSM does only distinguish between forest/wood and no 

It should be pretty safe to say that anything with >75% tree cover is
forest/wood.

> forest/wood, furthermore not all tree covered areas are tagged as such 
> like landuse=orchard.  leisure=park/leisure=garden can be largely tree 
> covered as well.

Yes, they are, but for the areas with little interest to mappers,
there is going to be very little landuse=orchard's and leisure=park's.

The data matches google's idea of wood pretty well.

Valid experiment would be comparing woods in well-mapped country with
what would be done by the import script. I believe the import would be
very nice for places where there are no woods mapped, like Turkey... 

> - the data is not very reliable, distinguishing between woodland and 
> scrubland as well as woodland and non-wooded wetlands based on spectral 
> characterisitics is tricky.

Wetland areas are very small/rare in countries like Czech
Republic... and we already got those from different source.

								Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html



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