[Talk-us] Mapping of State/county/national parks

[Adam Schreiber]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Tyler<tyler.ritchie at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why is landuse=forest not appropriate for parks/forests with the same uses
>> but with a "lower" administrative classification?  landuse=forest is for
>> managed land with trees on it regardless of who manages it.
>
> Because they often aren't forests. (I said similar use)
> Sometimes they're scrubland, beach, plains, dunes, rocky craginess,
> volcanos, river deltas...

So tag them with their appropriate landuse or natural tag.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features

The National Seashore would be natural=beach for example. Park might
be in the name, but fail to describe what's on the ground and that's
OK.

> The list goes on and on. I take landuse=forest to
> mean a managed forest meaning they're harvesting trees, moss or whatever,
> such as many state natural resource department's forest land or the National
> Forest lands (excluding wilderness areas) in the United states. And often
> parks at lower administrative classifications are set aside for recreation,
> not natural preservation or for logging, farming, grazing or harvesting any
> natural resources.
> As the case is in coastal states, there are coastal state parks consisting
> solely of beaches, and in the southwest of the United States there are state
> parks consisting solely of desert.

natural=desert

> Additionally landuse=forest doesn't accurately portray all of the Bureau of
> Land Managements lands--which account for 1/8th of the area of the US, of
> which landuse=forest is only appropriate for ~20%. It also would be
> entirely inappropriate for the United States National Grasslands, which are
> like the National Forests in almost every aspect, except that they are
> grasslands (and tagging them as such doesn't distinguish them from
> surrounding non-public use/recreation grasslands).

Then use the boundary key.  If you way up each of the unique sections,
then create a multipolygon relation out of all of the boundary ways
and additional multipolygons for each of the various landuses or
ground covers.

Adam