[Talk-us] Talk-us Digest, Vol 102, Issue 13

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

> 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.

Thank you for chiming in, Nathan.

Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com <mailto:penorman at mac.com>> replies:
> 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.

And this last part, I believe, is the source of at least part of the confusion.  My reading of the wiki for the many years I have been an OSM contributor (most of the history of this project) is that:

natural=wood is used for what is sometimes called “primeval forest.”  That is, a natural area of largely/mostly trees which have not been cut down (ever, or for a very long time) and are not going to be cut down, and

landuse=forest is used for what can be characterized as “timber, which can and will be harvested from the trees that grow here” (as an agricultural product, to make lumber, pulp, paper, wood products…).

Rendering these identically (or nearly) is problematic because these truly are different land uses.  The land cover which makes them up, as well as their appearance (in real life on the ground, via aerial or satellite images) are identical or close to it, but they are distinctly different land uses:  what might be called as different as a farm and a “vegetation sanctuary” (where no harvesting or “farming” is allowed).

I don’t know what the rationale was behind mapnik rendering conflating these two (natural=wood and landuse=forest) to be so similar with “little trees," but again, it is at least some of the source of the confusion.  This discussion goes on and on, and I believe that is a good thing, as it brings us closer to a more universal understanding of how to tag under what circumstances.

And Paul, I still believe it would be proper to tag those areas inside of US National Forests which ARE actually forested to have a tag of landuse=forest.  After all, the US Forest Service (who administers them for all Americans, their owner) is part of the US Department of Agriculture, and more often than not (I agree, not in wilderness areas found inside of USFS lands) I CAN harvest downed wood there (to make a fire when safe to do so, for example) and that most certainly qualifies as me harvesting timber in my forest lands.  I won’t press this by (new, continuing) wild and aggressive tagging in the map, preferring instead to listen for a wider consensus.

Tagging USFS boundaries with the (newer) boundary tags seems to me to be a good direction for us to go:  accurate and what feels like a fresh start.  Land use and/or land cover still need to be better defined as to their usage in these areas as the consensus about their semantics remains muddy, and conflated rendering does not seem to be helping.

SteveA
California
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