[talk-au] natural=wood why?

[Brent Easton]

Without going overboard, or creating anything too controlling, it would be nice to slowly add standards to the tagging page for other types of data.

The area I live in is nearly all farmland with the occasional area of wooded land. I've marked these out as areas with natural=wood and they look really nice on the map, nice color and texture. But I am starting think why? For what purpose? If I scan left another 10 k's, I hit the Great Dividing Range and it is virtually all forest. 

What are we planning to do about that? Are we going to mark out huge areas of forest accross the ranges with 'natural=wood', 'layer=-4'? If not, then what is the point of marking out small 'easy' sections of woods? 

What is our actual reason for marking the wooded areas? 
What are the alternatives?

Most maps of the scale we are working on map functional areas rather than vegetation type, so is what we really want marked on the map in green, National Park, Nature Reserve and State Forests?

It ...may... be possible to get hold of this data and get permission to add it to OSM. We could do this in bulk.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Brent.

____________________________________________________________
Brent Easton                       
Analyst/Programmer                               
University of Western Sydney                                   
Email: b.easton at uws.edu.au