[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - landuse bush

[Martin Søndergaard]

This whole discussion is reminding me of the previous discussions on fuzzy
features and the man_made=clear_cut tag from the forestry compartments
discussion.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2021 at 10:39, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <
tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> And if something is tree covered then it is taggable as either from
> landuse=forest / natural=wood / landcover=trees
>

I mostly agree with what you are saying and I am just using your reply as a
jumping off point.

There is a significant difference between these three tags that I haven't
seen anyone mention:

   - *landcover=trees* is an objective piece of information.
   Doesn't matter if the area is 100 m2 or 100 million m2. By default it
   doesn't state anything about origin (man made or natural) or about usage
   (forestry or park etc).
   - *forest *and* wood* are both human constructs.
   When an area of landcover=trees fulfills some set of criteria (of which
   there are hundreds if not thousands different definitions) then we as
   humans designate it as a forest or a wood. I would never call the small
   patch of trees in my backyard a forest or a wood, but I still have to tag
   it as such.

The fact is that a forest or wood can include many types of
landcover because it is itself not a physical thing, but a human construct.
I have personally had problems with this when tagging named forests. There
might be a small lake or pond within the forest, a small clearing of grass,
or (as mentioned in the forestry compartments discussion) a clear cut area.
These areas are all still part of the forest, but you can't tag it as such
without just leaving them overlapping (which is why many lakes now have
trees "growing" in them on carto).

It would be great if I could distinguish between the actual physical tree
cover (having "physical" tags such as leaf_type and species) and the
concept of the forest (having "non-physical" tags such as name, operator,
opening_hours and access) since these two features often do not overlap
exactly.

A perfect tagging scheme should allow the mapper to add information
progressively and leave out information which isn't known. I think this is
why the landuse=forest vs natural=wood distinction was doomed to fail.
These two tags forced the mapper to specify the origin of the tree cover
(is it man made or natural) before they could even map it. landcover=trees
(and similar landcover=grass, landcover=bushes, etc) fixes this problem.

\Martin Søndergaard
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