[Talk-us-massachusetts] aerial comparisons

[Greg Troxel]

"Peter Cooper Jr. via Talk-us-massachusetts"
<talk-us-massachusetts at openstreetmap.org> writes:

> There's also imagery available for several past years. I derived some
> links you can just put into the "Custom" background field of iD that
> are listed in an older version of the MassGIS Wiki page:
>
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=MassGIS&oldid=2160851#Imagery_&_Background_Layers>
>
> (Information on this older imagery has been removed from the current
> version of the page, and I'm not ambitious enough to bother restoring
> it, but if someone else wanted to I certainly wouldn't object.)

I don't know who deleted that or why.  +1 for restoring it.  It's good
to caution against using old imagery solely, but often you can tell
something is there from 2021 and pick up details from 2019 or earlier.

> Sometimes looking at the same spot across multiple years tells you
> something more than just one. But I'm not sure I myself think of
> "woods" as beginning and ending at distinct points (I mean, I might
> say that "I live in the woods" and be correct in a sense, though more
> accurately I live in a house that's surrounded by a lot of
> woods). Though OpenStreetMap's database doesn't deal well with "fuzzy"
> boundaries, so just putting the best guess you can in there of a line
> is probably as good as one can do.

I see it as "natural=wood applies when the primary landcover is trees,
so that when you stand on the ground you feel like there are trees
around you (and stone walls and trails), but mostly just that.  Maybe a
shed, but not lawn.

There is natural=tree to show individual trees, appropriate when they
are human-perceived separately especially in a city-style leisure=park:
  https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/42.43684/-71.50146

> The other really nifty tool, if you haven't seen it already, is the
> LiDAR Shaded Relief map, which is a bit older (from 2010 through 2015)
> but can help one see under the trees and such in a helpful way.

Rumor has it that a new LIDAR dataset will appear soon, also from 2021
observations.  But seriously, MassGIS has said they are working on it,
and I would not be surprised at a release date from today until next
spring.

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