[Talk-us] Wilderness areas separate from forest?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 8:40 PM Tod Fitch <tod at fitchfamily.org> wrote:
> If I am looking at the map data correctly, it seem that at least some designated wilderness areas are excluded from the forest that they are in. For example the Chumash Wilderness [1] seems to have its border as an outer on the Los Padres National Forest [2].
>
> This does not seem correct to me. In this specific case the wilderness is administered as part of the Mt. Pinos Ranger District of the Los Padres National Forest. I believe the same situation exists with the San Mateo Wilderness in the Cleveland National Forest.
>
> What is our tagging policy on this? Should the wilderness be shown as part of the forest that contains it?

My home state of New York has no Federally protected wilderness, but
we have rather a lot of wilderness that enjoys even stronger
State-level protection. Most of our designated wilderness areas (and
all that are titled Wilderness, as opposed to Forest Preserve Detached
Parcel or something) are located within the Adirondack and Catskill
Parks.

For the ones whose boundaries I've edited (that is to say, virtually
all of them), I've kept them consistently as inside the parks. It
seems to me, for instance, that it's nonsensical to make a cutout from
the Adirondack Park to accommodate the High Peaks Wilderness (or,
indeed, any of the other Wilderness, Wild Forest, Canoe or Primitive
Areas, etc; we have a whole menagerie of designations). Where a
wilderness area shares a boundary with the larger park, I've been
attempting to conflate the ways, but have only barely started on that
job, so there is a lot of nuisance misalignment at the edges. (In my
controversial opinion: better to have them mapped with nuisance
misalignments than not to have them mapped at all. Others, I
recognize, disagree.)

I've had to deal with the situation of crossing borders in only one
case, and that one is somewhat up in the air. There's one parcel of
Elm Ridge Wild Forest https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6373226
that's located outside the boundary of the Catskill Park. It's a newly
acquired (2013) parcel transferred from New York City to New York
State. The last (2015) approved amendment to the unit management plan
does not include this acquisitiion. The Catskill Park State Land
Master Plan of the time includes it as an 'Unclassified' parcel. There
were public hearings in 2016 regarding the planning (slides at
https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/lands_forests_pdf/haydenpubmeetaug10.pdf)
but as yet no formal publication of any conclusion. I've simply mapped
the area as a multipolygon, and intend to conflate borders where it
shares a border with the Catskill Park - but have not yet done so.

In conclusion, I agree with you that the wilderness area is indeed
part of the National Forest (or in my case, State Forest Preserve)
that contains it.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin