[talk-au] natural=wood why?

[Lachlan Rogers]

I have had occasion to wonder similar things.  Not long ago I added some of
Black Mountain Reserve to the Canberra map as natural=wood.  I think that it
makes sense to mark areas of natural woodland within a city - otherwise
there is an unexplained empty section on the map between suburbs.

Within built-up areas, it is useful to map natural areas like this.  Most
"Reserves" probably fit into this category.

I think that it is also clearly valuable to map National Parks and State
Forests, as these are typically also used for recreation.

The natural end-result of marking out areas of woodland (or "scrub",
"heath", etc) every time they occur would be that every bit of map area
would be "coloured in".  Topographic maps (such as used by hikers, mountain
bikers, and other recreational users) DO often have shading over the whole
map that reflects the type of ground cover.  However, road maps and travel
atlases typically do not.

I suspect that the answer for OSM at the moment is simply to map those
features which are useful.  Natural reserves in cities and towns explain the
"holes in the map", and so I would argue that in these contexts marking
"wood" or "marsh" is quite useful.  However, I doubt that colouring in the
whole Great Dividing Range green would really add a lot to OSM.

These are just my thoughts,

Lachlan


On 8/13/07, Brent Easton <b.easton at exemail.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>
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