[Talk-us] US Bureau of Land Management Boundaries

Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org
Sun Jan 6 07:02:40 UTC 2019


Brad — I make use of BLM / NPS / NF boundary data a lot too. I use Gaia GPS for this, which overlays this data nicely with what’s in OSM[1]. There are lots of other outdoor apps that do the same. I prefer this data live outside of OSM as well for similar reasons as Ian stated. Knowing whether land is public or private or whether it’s inside or outside a NP, is important to me when I’m in the outdoors. I would much rather rely on an authoritative definition of these boundaries, than on whatever happens to be in OSM. Since there is no on-the-ground verifiability, boundary data is prone to growing stale, as you can see happening with census place boundaries. Unreliable data in this case is worse than no data at all.
If you’re looking to make a great impact on the map as an outdoors user, I would suggest mapping things you know and things you observe when you’re out there. Countless times have I been out in the middle of nowhere, to find that some mapper before me added a landmark, a water source, or something else that really helped me. That is what I like to pay forward.

Martijn

[1] https://www.gaiagps.com/offroad/#maps <https://www.gaiagps.com/offroad/#maps> 

> On Jan 5, 2019, at 8:43 PM, brad <bradhaack at fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Ian, 
> I want to import this data because I think its important for a complete map.   We have national forest, wilderness  and national park boundaries in OSM!   This is no different.   If you look at many maps they show all of them.
> 
> I'd like it to show up on any map that I use.   I'm working on a 'better' version for garmin using mkgmap.   I hope it gets rendered with OpenAndroMaps too.   I haven't used the onine osm.org map very much.
> 
> I am excited to participate and improve OSM and in my opinion this is a big gap in the OSM database.   Where I live, we don't use OSM for building footprints, we use it to find our way in the national forest, the BLM land and the national parks.   It's very useful to know what is public or private land.
> 
> Brad 
> 
> On 1/5/19 8:19 PM, Ian Dees wrote:
>> Hi Brad, thanks for proposing this import and posting it here.
>> 
>> I would strongly prefer that we not import boundaries like this into OSM. Boundaries of all sorts are almost impossible to verify with OSM's "on the ground" rule, but BLM boundaries in particular are such an edge case (they have no other analog in the world, really) and almost never have apparent markings on the ground to check. Since these boundaries aren't visible, this data can never be improved by an OpenStreetMap contributor. The boundaries are defined by the government, and any sort of change to them would make them diverge from the official source.
>> 
>> But having said that, I'm curious why you wanted to import this data? Did you want to have it show up on the osm.org <http://osm.org/> map? Are you trying to build a custom map? Or are you excited to participate and improve OSM? If it's the latter, there's lots of other data that is a better fit to import into OSM: address points and building footprints come to mind, for example.
>> 
>> -Ian
>> 
>> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 9:03 PM brad <bradhaack at fastmail.com <mailto:bradhaack at fastmail.com>> wrote:
>> I'd like to import BLM (US Bureau of Land Management) boundaries into 
>> OSM.    This is not an automated import as you can see from my workflow.
>> 
>> Workflow:
>> Download shape file from PADUS (1 state at a time): 
>> https://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/data/download/ <https://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/data/download/>
>> Load into Qgis and filter for BLM boundaries
>> Clean up as necessary (there are some extraneous ways at state 
>> boundaries & elsewhere)
>> 
>> Convert to OSM with ogr2osm and the following tags
>>      tags.update({'type':'boundary'})
>>      tags.update({'boundary':'protected_area'})
>>      tags.update({'operator':'BLM'})
>>      tags.update({'ownership':'national'})
>>      tags.update({'protect_class':'27'})
>>      tags.update({'source':'US BLM'})
>>      use the shapefile attribute 'Unit_Nm' as the name
>> 
>> Import with JOSM
>> 
>> The San Luis unit (CO) is here for your inspection.
>> https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxv5gny2396ewki/sanLuisBLM.osm?dl=0 <https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxv5gny2396ewki/sanLuisBLM.osm?dl=0>
>> 
>> Comments?
> 
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