[Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[stevea]

I am disappointed to see landuse=forest removed from the very 
quintessence of what our wiki defines as "forest:" our USDA's 
National Forests.  True, our wiki page (forest) defines four distinct 
tagging approaches which use this tag, all of which can be assumed to 
be correct, even as they might conflict with each other.

However, the wiki definition of "forest" is unambiguous:  "areas of 
land managed for forestry."  This is PRECISELY, EXACTLY what a 
National Forest is.  Just because any particular chunk of it is not 
ACTIVELY having trees felled doesn't mean it isn't a forest.  It 
COULD have trees felled (because it is an area of land managed for 
forestry), so it IS a forest.

Whenever I recreate at a National Forest, I (or anybody as a humble 
US Citizen or National) can pluck wood from the ground and use it to 
build a (safe) campfire, for example.  (Provided other, seasonal, 
regulations don't prohibit this fire-building because of safety 
concerns).  This is land being used as a forest, and I will tag it as 
such.  The whole area, actually, because that is correct.

I wish Martijn had not removed these tags in Utah, and I don't want 
to see this tag removed from National Forests I and others have so 
tagged in California.  Sure, including the newer tags of 
boundary=protected_area and protect_class=6 is a good idea, because 
those tags are also correct.  So is the tag landuse=forest.  It does 
not appear that a consensus is reached about this, as Martijn (and 
what appear to be folks in the UK and Germany, largely) seem to agree 
to remove landuse=forest, but at least Charlotte and I believe it 
should remain.

And, Charlotte's point about subunits not being combined is also 
correct:  if name=* tags of the subunits are different, don't combine 
them into a single multipolygon (please).

The new forest rendering appears to occur at a "higher" (later) CSS 
layer than other layers such as meadow (and as Martijn noticed, 
natural=water creating a lake inside of a forest).  This causes some 
double-rendering to occur now where it didn't before.  The "punch 
through" that happened with meadow (and lake) caused a visually 
pleasing rendering to occur that no longer does.  In my opinion, this 
should also be addressed (fixed) with the new rendering of forest: 
code it so it allows other polygons superimposed on the forest (such 
as meadow and bodies of water) to "punch through" and not draw the 
little trees icons there.  It worked before, it can work this way 
again.

SteveA
California