[Tagging] Tagging Digest, Vol 35, Issue 32

[Johan Jönsson]

St Niklaas <st.niklaas at ...> writes:
> 
> 
IMHO is a grass covered area, temporarily, scrubbs and trees are covering it 
without care in an short period of time, whos tagging it again ? Why not 
nature as tag in nature reserve area 's. Just to avoid the immage Ive seen, 
with a large forest area and a view trees besides it. Tagged as beiing a group 
or a forest. You dont have to worry about the actually grow of the different 
plants if you use nature and forget if its 1,00 (grass), 3,00 (scrubbs)or 5,00 
m (trees) high. Or is that to simple ? 
> 
The devil is in the details, if there is ways to map details in ,for instance 
a wood then it will lead to what you describe. When some areas are mapped in 
detail it could look strange with the neighbouring areas mapped more generally.

In that aspect, there is no difference in mapping landcover. You could still 
end up in a lot of small detailed areas instead of one big. And just the same 
you could map large swaths of lands. A forest could be mapped with "trees" and 
a grassland with a few trees could be mapped "grass".

My suggestion is to extend the mapping of a forest with
"trees"
trees:cover=closed
shrubs:cover=open
grass:cover=open
this would be a forest with shrubs and grass underneath.

"trees"
trees:cover=closed
shrubs:cover=absent
grass:cover=absent
this would be a dark nordic spruce forest.

"grass"
trees:cover=sparse
shrubs:cover=absent
grass:cover=closed
this would be a grassland with some trees but no bushes.

So the basic idea is that you can map an area with "trees" and be done with it.
If you want you can add more details in other tags of the area, but you do not 
have too. The map-drawers will probably only look at the first tag "trees", 
but if they want to they can use the other info for something fun.