[Tagging] Landcover... not again?....!

[Peter Elderson]

It's going off in all directions again...

I asked:
What about the idea of supporting the proposed landcover values to the
natural key?

That is: for the natural key, support the values grass and trees.
This would help to map areas of trees and grass comprised within a larger
landuse e.g. military, residential, industrial.
It would avoid the practice of mapping natural=wood or natural=grassland
for those areas.

It accepts the current practice that the natural key describes land forms
as well as land cover and features growing on the land such as a single
tree or a line of trees.

It would require no retagging of any kind.

It just solves the issue that you can't map land cover and land use for the
same feature if landuse is used for land cover.


Vr gr Peter Elderson


Op do 5 mei 2022 om 22:51 schreef Peter Elderson <pelderson at gmail.com>:

> I got notice that the latest landcover proposal turned to "inactive".
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Proposed_features/landcover&diff=next&oldid=2124394
>
> Which is correct. But the issue remains!
> The landcover key usage count is now 327 995. When I joined, a couple of
> years ago, the count was far below 50K
> Value percentages: trees 80% grass 10% scrub 3,5%
>
> The idea lives on.
>
> Looking at the proposals, I noticed
> 1.  that the main incentive for the landcover tags is the use of the
> landuse key to tag landcover, while many areas are used for one thing and
> at the same time can have different landcovers. And, the same
> landcover occurs on or within different  landuse areas.
>
> 2. that the proposed values are much more compatible with the natural key,
> and in fact already exist there. This according to the now predominant view
> that natural= does not say it's nature as opposed to human, but rather
> expresses that the element grows or flows by itself, possibly (often)
> influenced by humans, but it has a 'life' of its own.
>
> 3. the proposers make exceptions for water, sand and scrub, because they
> do not think people will ever change those to landcover. I agree.
>
> So my current thinking is:
> If such landcovers can exist and be applied massively without problems
> within the natural key, then the other proposed landcovers can also exist
> in the natural key.
>
> And in fact they already do.
>
> Proposed landcover=sand already exists as natural=sand
> Proposed landcover=water already exists as natural=water
> Proposed/used landcover=trees is almost equivalent with natural=wood
> Proposed/used landcover=grass is almost equivalent with natural=grassland
> Proposed/used landcover=scrub is equivalent with natural=scrub
>
> I wouldn't mind support for natural=trees (so natural=wood can be reserved
> for the landscape type) and natural=grass (so natural=grassland could be
> reserved for the landscape type) but I doubt if that would make any
> practical difference.
>
> This would enable taggers to stop using landuse=forest for any small area
> with some trees, and landuse=grass for any small patch of grass. Especially
> for areas actually having a different landuse, such as military,
> industrial, residential.
>
> Peter Elderson
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20220506/f93b7906/attachment.htm>