[Talk-us-massachusetts] Fwd: meadow & woods?

[Jim Snyder-Grant]

I'm launched again into improving our paper and online maps for Acton
trails.  Greg T suggested I use this list for advice.

Our old maps had nicely drawn representations of landcover: forest,
wetlands & meadows, mostly. It's easy to find wetlands data, but the other
landcover data seems spotty. If I end up adding my own, I'd at least like
to use tags that y'all find generally reasonable. (our map strategy is to
start from OSM data as our base & and render different styles as needed).

I looked around Massachusetts using the https://overpass-turbo.eu
interface, and looked at the tag wiki, and found a mixed bag, but I've
ended up thinking that natural=xxxx is the way to go for now inside our
conservation areas.

In Massachusetts, I see quite a few thousand uses of landuse=meadow. It's
pretty sparse around here: I see one in Littleton and a bunch in Concord,
so that seems OK.  There's also even more of landuse=forest, but then the
tag wiki wants us to save that for managed forests like tree plantations.
The wiki database has info on a new key called 'landcover' that seems more
like what I am looking for, but so far there's only 5 in all of MA,
including a fine area in Stow: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/183513179
 with landcover=trees and natural=wood.

Oh:  natural=wood might be good. There's a handful around here and
thousands around the state. And natural=grassland is even less common, but
at least it's used some, and in ways that I would expect.

So for now, that's how I plan to mark the innards of my conservation land
areas: with natural=wood and natural=grassland. And I see that
natural=wetland is already pretty well used. Hooray.

Your thought would be very welcome.

-Jim

Jim Snyder-Grant
18 Half Moon Hill
Acton MA 01720
508 572-2985
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