[Talk-us] US Bureau of Land Management Boundaries

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019, 11:48 brad <bradhaack at fastmail.com wrote:

> I'm going to start close to home, extend that to the state of CO, & see
> how it goes.
> I've done quite a bit of recreating and boondock camping on BLM land and
> I've never come across any that are leased exclusively, altho I'm sure
> there are some.    It's more of a rarity, than 'most of'.


Ok. I knew exclusive leases exist, not how usual they are. I've other
correspondents who've complained about what they see as a trend toward such
arrangements. I personally have the good fortune to live in New York, which
has very little Federal land, but a wealth of state-protected land whose
protection is enshrined in the state constitution.

Politically, your comment that the inhabitants resent BLM ownership is a
> gross generalization.   I'd say that the majority of western inhabitants
> do not resent it.
>

Careless editing! I even thought while typing that message that I needed to
go back and change 'the' to 'some' - but clearly didn't do it!  Sorry!
Still, one of our political parties has latched onto the issue. (Obviously,
not all members of any party share all its leaders' opinions.) In any case,
it's undeniable that a political controversy exists and has garnered media
attention.

In any case, in general we map land use, land cover and land access, not
land ownership. Of course, those attributes often follow property lines, so
cadastre has a way of coming along for the ride, but the focus should not
be on the ownership. There's no consensus about whether cadastre should be
in OSM at all, but boundaries for public-access facilities such as parks
are widely tolerated.  (Hardliners would exclude all cadastral data,
including boundary=administrative, but they appear to be a relatively small
minority.) Tagging with landuse=farmland/meadow/forest/..., with or without
natural=wood/grassland/heath/scrub/moor/... would be appropriate (assuming
that either the use or the cover is coterminous with the parcel), as would
leisure=nature_reserve if passive recreation in nature is the parcel's
purpose. Boundary=protected_area is appropriate if and only if the
protection status is known. For at least some BLM lands, there is not
significant protection; it's 'working land' that happens to be
government-owned. (alaskadave's comments notwithstanding, this last
sentence is not intended to be a comment, for well or ill, on BLM's
stewardship.)

Hey, whad'ya know... I even wikified something about that...
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Parcel#Parcel_data_as_a_secondary_source
. I don't remember writing that, but I still agree with it.
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