[Talk-us-massachusetts] MassGIS landcover dataset sample

[hobbit at techno-fandom.org]

Wow, that looks pretty busy.  Trying to jam *every* little patch of trees
into the database seems almost like overkill, despite the present state of
RI and NJ and others ... On the what-to-do-about-parks angle, I would think
a reasonable approach might be to map the major treed areas that extend
outside the boundaries, in a relation with the major internal park non-wood
features carved out like Tom P. did with the Fells, and then at least in
Carto you get a lot of green *with* the official boundary visible as the
darker line through it.  Personally I think that looks fairly straightforward,
and still carries the idea that the woods aren't just about the park parcels
without necessarily making *everything* "green from space'.

The kicker I learned last week is that those inner carvings can't be relations,
or at least it's inadvisable, which came as a surprise.  Ways it is, then.
Otherwise, I don't think that would be all that hard to draw in the supersets
of real wood landcover, even with iD working in small viewports.  No large-
object copying needed.

I thought "conservation" had some very special particular meaning in MA?  I
saw discussion of that go by in my big catch-up but didn't really absorb it,
and  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Massachusetts/Conservation  sort of
just muddies the issue.

I wonder if it would be possible to take a selection of GIS woods data and
make a layer with a kind of "fuzziness" with an area threshold, and then drop
out the tiny patches below that threshold to leave the larger significant
areas of real woods asserted?  I suspect that no automated process will ever
deliver the "right thing" without a lot of post-intervention, though.

_H*