[Talk-us] Wilderness Data

[stevea]

A significant subset of the fresh data published on the 
aforementioned US Forest Service (USFS) site (National Forest and 
Wilderness boundaries, others are available) were successfully 
transformed from NAD83/shapefile to WGS84/.osm.  (Thanks to all who 
made technical suggestions -- they worked!).  Results from data at 
this site are nationwide.  Both National Forest and Wilderness 
boundary sets yield huge files:  each is hundreds of megabytes, 
unwieldy on most JOSM desktops.  So, any US Contributor could do the 
same, then "regionalize" these data into smaller chunks:  recommended 
both for JOSM performance reasons and to "share the load" among OSM 
community.  If you wish to follow my ten step technical data 
transformation, which takes nationwide data sets (for forests, 
wilderness...) and successfully isolates single forests or wilderness 
areas while respecting multipolygon memberships, I am happy to send 
you my workflow.

A wiki page tracks this effort: 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/US_Forest_Service_Data.  I 
encourage US Contributors to compare their local/current OSM state of 
National Forests and any contained Wilderness areas with these data, 
and to become aware of any OSM community that may be importing them. 
If so, offer a heads up that these new data are available -- and your 
thanks.  If not, feel free to contribute these USFS data to OSM 
yourself!

I am starting this in USFS Pacific Southwest Region 5, (California), 
a staggering 20 million acres (8 million hectares) of forest.  My 
first case was with Los Padres National Forest, an area stretching 
nearly half the state, 48% of it containing ten distinct wilderness 
areas.  The good news:  this "first seed is planted" using these new 
USFS data, and mapnik/standard rendering is presently occurring.  I 
now move on to Angeles, Cleveland and San Bernardino National Forests 
(and their wilderness area subsets), then I intend to complete Region 
5's eastern and northern National Forests:  1 down, 3 to do now, 15 
more to go:  whew!

Cheers,

SteveA
California