[Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[Paul Norman]

On 8/19/2015 2:29 AM, Nathan Mixter wrote:
> 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.

As this isn't US specific, you should probably raise this on the tagging 
list.

One of the few areas of forest tagging where there is consensus is that 
a US "National Forest" does not get a landuse=forest tag. Fortunately, 
we're getting towards having fixed up many areas in the US where this 
was made. Beyond that, there are many opinions on where to use 
natural=wood and where to use landuse=forest, none of which are 
universal. This is why OpenStreetMap Carto renders natural=wood the same 
as landuse=forest. It's also intentional that trees are present on the 
rendering everywhere that one of these is tagged.