[Talk-us] Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (landuse=forest and US National forests again)

[Kevin Kenny]

Mess is right. There is fundamental misunderstanding about the difference
between land ownership, land protection, land use and land cover.

I know what I decided to do in the reimport of New York state lands, but I
can't recommend it as a best practice, because every single tag that I
proposed had objections raised. (I eventually decided to go ahead with the
way I did it, because nobody who raised an objection had a better
suggestion.)


What I did is complicated because the governing law is complicated, but a
quick summary was that Wild Forest and Wilderness areas (which enjoy
extremely strong protection under the state constitution as Forever Wild -
and have timber harvest prohibited in perpetuity) are tagged

    boundary=protected_area protect_class=1b leisure=nature_reserve

which makes no assertions about landcover (which in those areas is mostly
'old second growth', with the oldest trees about 150 years old). I also
added 'governance', 'protection_title', 'related_law', 'site_ownership' as
recommended.

For State Forest, where the State cannot sell the land but can allow timber
harvest (and for which timber production is the statutory objective), I
tagged

    boundary=protected_area protect_class=6 protection_object=timber
landuse=forest leisure=nature_reserve

They are 'nature reserves' in that they are protected from development, and
that public access for recreational purposes is a recognized secondary
objective in their management. They are 'forests' in that they are managed
for forestry, with regular timber harvests on most of them and many active
reforestation projects on the ones that are worn-out farmland or scrubland.
Alas, this causes many to interpret that they must be entirely covered by
trees - which they are not. They are frequently large parcels that contain
lakes, marshes, and scrublands as well as woods. I maintain that the
interpretation of 'landuse=forest' as denoting any sort of land cover is a
mistake. Forestry is, by statute, the land use in these.

Similarly, the New York City water protection units, most of which are also
heavily forested, are tagged

    boundary=protected_area protect_class=12 protection_object=water
leisure=nature_reserve

Once again, public recreation is permitted and encouraged as a secondary
objective of the land management.

There was a whole zoo of other land classifications, to which similar
reasoning was applied.

I frankly do not know what a 'natural' wood is. In my part of the world,
there is no such thing as an 'unmanaged' woodland. The old growth forests,
with six-hundred-year-old cedars and forty-metre-tall hemlocks, are managed
perhaps more intensively than any other government land. It is true that
the management consists primarily in protecting them against incursions by
development, limiting access to passive uses such as hiking, ski touring
and birding, and otherwise allowing Nature to take her course, but much
time and effort is spent on just that. 'Unmanaged' woodland simply does not
exist around here. Most land that is not in state hands has been developed
and allowed to fall to ruin multiple times in the three or four hundred
years that the land has been settled by Europeans. Huge trees sprout from
the ruins of abandoned farms, mines and villages.

Because 'natural' woods do not exist, I suspect, here or anywhere, I use
'natural=wood' for all land that looks like forest. That fact is observable
whether I know the management policy or not. (The places that I tagged
'landuse=forest' are ones where the management policy is observable in the
field by means of signage.) I might prefer 'landcover=trees', but that is
not widely recognized; it does not render, and JOSM treats it as an
unrecognized value. I haven't tagged very much land cover in any case. In
producing my own maps, I use other sources of land cover data that are more
comprehensive (albeit less accurate) than OSM. Since most of what I've
contributed has been in some way 'scratching my own itch,' I simply haven't
had much incentive to work on land cover.

Forestry is an aspect of land management that seems to be mired in
misunderstanding. The concept that a tract of land the size of some
countries could be reserved by statute for the production of timber,
despite the fact that some areas within it are not wooded, not amenable to
reforestation, and will never be suited to timber production, is something
that appears almost to offend some OSM'ers. I've heard the serious
suggestion that National and State Forests not be mapped since they are
'mere' property lines. Nevertheless, they are significant cultural,
recreational, and political features. In New York, the boundaries of the
Adirondack Park, and of the designated preserves inside it, are much more
significant to the local communities than the boundaries of counties or
townships. People identify with the preserves, and expect to see them on
maps, the way they see them signed on the roads that cross or skirt them.
Out West, the National Forests and BLM Lands are the same way - they are
the significant political boundaries, more significant than county,
municipality or perhaps even state lines.It is not the incorporation into a
political entity that makes them so. It is the fact of government ownership
of the land, and legislatively prescribed management policy.

I don't claim that what I did is in any sense 'correct.' I simply thought
that it was important to map recreation areas accessible to the public
somehow, asked for input here (and on 'imports', and 'Tagging'), saw a
failed consensus, and went with something that made sense to me. It was the
nearest thing in the existing tagging structure to what I could see on the
ground and in the community. Nobody's reverted it yet.




On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 4:08 PM, Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com> wrote:

> On 11/29/2016 7:14 AM, Andy Townsend wrote:
>
>> All I know of the area is"lots of parts of it do have lots of trees", but
>> does the landuse=forest assignment make sense on the National Forest
>> boundary, or should it be on the forested areas within?  I mention this
>> here rather because I'm sure there are people here familiar with the area,
>> which I'm not.
>>
>
> The forested areas within. Or natural=wood, both get used in practice, but
> that's an entire different mess.
>
>
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