[Tagging] Tagging National Forests

[Warin]

For me, forestry is the production of wood, using trees. So a 'forestry 
area' would include mature trees, young trees, saplings, fresh plantings 
and places where the trees have been removed.
I think that is what is meant by landuse = forest

On the other hand there are areas that are covered in trees .. that are 
not intended to be used for wood products, so natural=wood (or 
landcover=trees) is more appropriate.


On 17/08/2015 7:45 PM, Daniel Koć wrote:
> W dniu 17.08.2015 4:10, Martijn van Exel napisał(a):
>
>> But after some discussion I realized that this may be a side effect of
>> a different problem, namely how we tag national forests. In the US,
>> these seem to be tagged as landuse=forest which is only partly true:
>> within a National Forest, many different land uses can occur, only one
>> of them being forest.
>
> We had the same problem with imports of national forests in Poland. 
> It's exactly the counterintuitive problem you've mentioned: forest 
> area is not always covered with trees! In our case that was probably 
> just areas being property of the national forest operator "Lasy 
> Państwowe" (which is the same as "National Forests" by coincidence =} ).
>
>> So should we just not tag National Forests as landuse=forest?
>
> We started redrawing the boundaries, so the forest is just the ground 
> truth (only the trees), but now I'm not sure that was the best action 
> to take, even if simple and useful. Somebody lately said, that the 
> forest area may include burned areas, young trees fields and other 
> such things. I'm not into the forestry, but it looks we have the 
> opportunity to redefine our trees/forest tags, starting from general 
> understanding what the forest really is and what parts it consists of. 
> While discussions about landcover=trees are useful, they are way too 
> narrow. I feel we need to rethink the whole tree tagging in OSM, 
> because we have no general agreement on the subject:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Forest
>
> The whole issue is not as straightforward as one can reasonably 
> expect. According to Wikipedia:
>
> "A forest is a large area of land covered with trees or other woody 
> vegetation.[1] Hundreds of more precise definitions of forest are used 
> throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree 
> height, land use, legal standing and ecological function.[2][3][4] 
> According to the widely-used[5][6] United Nations Food and Agriculture 
> Organization definition, forests covered an area of four billion 
> hectares (15 million square miles) or approximately 30 percent of the 
> world's land area in 2006.[4]"
>
> The FAO definition is linked:
>
> http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y4171e/y4171e10.htm
>
> and it has about 17 pages on my screen. Actually it's rather good that 
> it is so comprehensive, because it may be a good base for 
> understanding the background and to identify parts we may be 
> interested in. Another idea is to research common GIS practices 
> regarding trees.
>
> Anybody willing to get deeper into the subject?
>