[Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[Nathan Mixter]

I would like to see areas in OSM categorized as either land use, land cover
(which we call natural for the most part in OSM) or administrative to clear
the confusion. I am also in favor of eliminating the landuse=forest tag at
least in its current incarnation and switching any official forested areas
to boundary tags.

I think most of us would agree that having trees across an area with few or
no trees looks weird. Yes, I know - don't tag for the render, blah blah.
But it seems like it would make sense if we kept wood and forest areas
separate. Since natural=wood and landuse=forest virtually render the same
now, they should be treated differently than they are currently.

Before, portions of southern California, Arizona and Utah were lit up with
their landuse=forest tags everywhere looking like massive Christmas tree
farms the way they rendered. Now that wood and forest look similar, there
is a smoother flow between the two but still much cleanup to do.

I'd like to see most administrative boundaries be tagged with just a
thicker or dashed border. Even most non city parks should not be green but
should just have the same boundary=protected_area type border. An admin
boundary should always be the base. The "color" in the map should come from
the land cover in rural areas and the landuse in urban areas. This means
that a national forest shouldn't have the landuse tag. We need to make it
harder for people to accidentally edit an official border rather than
easier.

If an admin area has a landuse tag attached to it, then people who try to
expand and modify it to include a surrounding forest or treed area will get
confused and accidentally move the admin area by mistake. The two areas
need to be separate otherwise people have to try to connect land cover
areas to admin areas in order to map land areas.

In any discussions about land use and land cover, we should look at what
organizations have done and how they have mapped ares. For instance, in
USGS imagery in JOSM you can see how they render borders with just a dashed
line and let the land cover have various shades of color on top of it.

The U.S. Forest Service has a distinct classification for mapping
vegetation within the forest. And the USDA differentiates between use of
forest land and forest cover (
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/glossary.aspx).

Here is how the USGS defines land use and land cover (
http://www.mrlc.gov/nlcd92_leg.php and in more depth at
http://landcover.usgs.gov/pdf/anderson.pdf). Not sure how other countries
map land use and land cover, but this is a sample from what the U.S. does.

From
http://www.ers.usda.gov/about-ers/strengthening-statistics-through-the-interagency-council-on-agricultural-rural-statistics/land-use-and-land-cover-estimates-for-the-united-states.aspx#h
"Land use and land cover are often related, but they have different
meanings. Land use involves an element of human activity and reflects human
decisions about how land will be used. Land cover refers to the vegetative
characteristics or manmade constructions on the land’s surface."

The site also has a good break down of how different organizations view
land use and land cover. It is interesting to note how organizations view a
"forest". Most of the agencies listed view it as an area with trees. Forest
land is broken up into deciduous and evergreen, something we might be able
to incorporate into the OSM rendering eventually.

I would love to see OSM reach a consensus on this long standing issue and
be able to move forward and even expand the land cover definitions further
to incorporate more features and make them easier to map.

Thanks for reading, Nathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20150819/93b60afb/attachment-0001.html>