[Tagging] Tagging small areas of bushes, flowers, non-woody perennials, succulents, etc

[Jeroen Hoek]

On 09-02-20 03:33, Joseph Eisenberg wrote:
> In the discussion about `barrier=hedge` areas, it is clear that
> mappers want a way to tag small areas of bushes and shrubs, and not
> everyone is happy about using natural=scrub for this case.
> 
> Currently there is a tag landuse=grass for small areas of managed
> grass, but this might be considered to exclude other non-woody herbs.
> And leisure=garden is usually considered the whole area of a garden,
> rather than being limited to a certain type of vegetation.
>
> I would suggest that we need a more developed system of tags for
> micro-mapping small areas of plants, not just woody-stemmed bushes and
> shrubs, but also semi-annuals, herbaceous perenials (e.g. in the
> tropics) and annual flowers and herbs.

Agreed. This is basically what the landcover proposal set out to do.

`landuse=*`, `amenity=*`, and `leisure=*` all (primarily) describe the
human use of the area, whereas the tagging of patches of grass, bushes,
flower beds, etc. describes what covers the land (usually within one of
the human-use tags, e.g., `leisure=park`).

> This would also help with problems like using village_green for all
> sorts of areas: see discussions and examples in
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:landuse%3Dvillage_green
> 
> Rather than just discussing how the tag small areas of bushes or
> hedges, how about how to tag this area of flowers:
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Vg6.jpg
> 
> Or a garden bed planted with these:
> https://www.thaigardendesign.com/bird-of-paradise-strelitzia/ - or
> these: https://www.wikilawn.com/flowers/ornamental-red-ginger-plant-alpinia-purpurata/
> 
> Or this bed full of succulent plants, in a semi-arid region:
> https://www.finegardening.com/app/uploads/sites/finegardening.com/files/images/spotlight-collection/resize_of_pa230150.jpg

By adopting the landcover-tag there will be a clear base-tag for
anything that qualifies as landcover. Introducing new tags should be a
lot more straightforward. Certainly compared to the current ambiguous
set of `landuse=grass`, `natural=scrub`, and `barrier=hedge`.

> Are people micro-mapping areas such as these?
> 
> How specific should the tagging be?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/landcover makes a
valiant attempt at answering that, but the landcover-tag is by its
nature as a single top-level tag for landcover extensible.

Also:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/landcover#values

I found the two cases of `landcover=rubber` a particularly creative form
of micro-mapping, and couldn't figure out why anyone would cover the
ground in rubber until I saw that it was used inside of a
`leisure=playground`, where it makes sense.

Of course, as anyone who supports the landcover-proposal knows,
landcover-tags cannot really be used on their own at the moment. If I
map in the Netherlands, where an initial import used `landuse=grass`,
`natural=scrub`, and `natural=forest` to broadly map land cover, I have
to double-tag these features with the tags that get rendered on
OSM-Carto, *and* the `landcover=*` tags I want to support, because not
doing that would mean that in the eyes of many users I leave empty areas
where there once was (roughly drawn) colour. That breaks my rule of
making a nice map.

It all boils down to what Paul Allen rightly calls joined-up thinking:

* Many mappers wish to map right down to the level of flower beds and
shrubs, and especially in urban settings this often results in rather
nicely mapped areas

* The landcover-proposal exists, is well thought out, and the top three
tags exceed 10000 instances of use each, despite not being rendered, and
not being supported as presets in JOSM and Id, which makes sense,
because they're not rendered as opposed to their legacy counterparts.

* Carto-OSM points out inconsistencies in the use of `barrier=hedge`,
attempts to resolve the situation but breaks existing use, but any
proposed solution to allow for the rendering of hedges drawn as areas is
shot down because it would mean converting tags from something that did
render (and now renders brokenly) to something that doesn't render, and
likely won't render for years.

So once again any progress on this front stalls indefinitely, mappers
move on and keep on using whatever renders for these features, and
eventually all hedges mappes as areas will be replaced by
`natural=scrub`, because it renders something green and isn't broken,
which is a step forward from the current situation.

Most of the time new tags can be introduced gradually and organically,
starting with unrendered use, modest proposals, and eventually presets
in the editors and rendering on OSM-Carto. For some more complex
situations like this landcover/hedges problem, a more integrated
approach may be more fruitful.