[Tagging] Is landuse=conservation actually deprecated?

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

These are all excellent points and I 100% support Steve's comments.

This discussion has convinced me that there is a place for
landuse=conservation.  It might be a mild oxymoron (land used by humans to
prevent human use), perhaps equivalent to the question of "is black a color
or the absence of color?", but I am perfectly willing to accept the notion
that black is a color.  Prior to these discussions, I was unaware that its
deprecation was a unilateral action in 2017 by a single user.  At this
point in OSM, IMO we shouldn't mark anything deprecated short of an
approved proposal to do so.  So, I support restoring that tag to reflect
current usage.

I think there is a place for boundary=protected_area,
leisure=nature_reserve, and landuse=conservation to all exist and mean
different things (though often they will overlap).

boundary=protected_area makes sense for the overall property boundary of a
protected area[1].  In many cases, these areas are mostly conservation (by
land area) but might have mixed usages.  It is entirely reasonable that you
might have a large state park that's mostly wooded but has a small section
with some baseball fields.  So you could have the area with the athletic
fields tagged landuse=recreation_ground, and the rest of the park (which is
all woods/wetlands and maybe has some hiking trails) could be tagged
landuse=conservation.  This allows for data questions like "how much land
is set aside for conservation" more accurate than simply tabulating all of
the protected_area land.

So in that sense, it does make sense to be able to tag "how the land is
used" separately from "the boundary of land that is protected".  This also
allows you to tag a *name* to the boundary=protected_area, which allows you
to name the whole park, but not necessarily just those parcels that are
purely in a conservation status.

Similarly, the leisure tag, defined in the wiki as "places people go in
their spare time" also applies to a place where people can go to walk
through the woods (or whatever land cover exists in your area) to enjoy
nature, with the tag leisure=nature_reserve.  (there is a debate as to
whether leisure=nature_reserve can/should apply to nature reserves where
the public is not allowed to visit, but that's a separate question).

I could also conceive of a private landowner creating a nature reserve as a
tourist attraction but not protected by any particular protection status,
and that perhaps we would want to tag that as leisure=nature_reserve but
not necessarily boundary=protected_area or landuse=conservation.  We could
probably invent a situation for all of the Venn diagram cases here.

So... boundary=protected_area for the overall boundary,
landuse=conservation for the actual land plots that are managed for
conservation, and leisure=nature_reserve to indicate the activity of
enjoying nature.  All separate aspects which may often converge but are
still slightly different enough that they warrant separate tags.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_area
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