[Tagging] Deprecation of landuse=forest (was: Feature Proposal - RFC - boundary=forest(_compartment) relations)

[David Marchal]

Frederik,

Deprecating landuse=forest was not the initial goal of the proposal, hence the title: it is a remain of the first draft of the proposal, which did not deprecate landuse=forest, and was by no way meant to trick the community. However, I understand that you felt tricked, and I apologize for that.

You talk about forestry about a niche interest, but remember what forestry is: it is the discipline of the human management of forests. Given the surface covered by trees on the planet, and the proportion of this surface which is, one way or another, managed by humans, I would not call "a niche interest" the fact of being able to unambiguously tell that the wooded area is subject to human management.

I understand the difficulty of retagging the current landuse=forest entities, should the proposal be approved, but this process is not assumed to take place in a few days. It would take years to re-tag all current landuse=forest entities. That being said, remember that the goal is to, at least, having an unambiguous tagging scheme to model managed wooded areas, that is to say to be able to unambiguously model human influence over a significant portion of our planet. Remember also how the current situation is messy, with six different contradictory approaches for mapping forests and no unique tagging scheme to tell if they are managed or not.

Such a confusion should be dealt with, but it seems there never was such a try to clarify the situation and remove the confusion, which have poisonned OSM mapping for years. I worked with others on this for months, in order to finally give a consistent possibility to overrun this issue. I sincerely hope the community will seize this chance to solve this long lasting problem, even if it changes some habits. The longer the community will wait for a resolution, the harder the answer will be and the more habits will have to evolve.

Regards.


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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Le dimanche, 11. avril 2021 17:44, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> I have looked at this for the first time today.
>
> Before, judging from the subject line, I thought: Ok, someone wants to
> map some forest details, I'm fine with that.
>
> Now I find out that instead someone wants to deprecate landuse=forest
> which is used over half a million times in my country - basically for
> anything that has trees on it but is not completely unmanaged.
>
> It was certainly not the intention of the original author, but I do feel
> a little tricked here. Saying clearly that you want to get rid of
> landuse=forest would have made me look at this more closely!
>
> I have now voted against the proposal. In my eyes, mapping boundaries
> (and sub-boundaries) of managed forests is a niche interest. For me as a
> non-forestry-expert, I'm mainly interested in where trees are and where
> no trees are. I don't care much for whether an area is theoretically
> under forestry management or not. There is room in OSM for niche
> interests, I have no problem with that, but I won't let a niche interest
> tell me that half a million forests in Germany need to be re-tagged now
> (and possibly even with some fuzziness along the borders, like "uh the
> managed area ends here, yes there are still trees after that but those
> are not part of the forestry area" and stuff like that).
>
> I'm sorry for not chiming in earlier, I would have if the subject had
> told me that the plan is to get rid of landuse=forest altogether.
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/boundary%3Dforestry(_compartment)_relations
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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