[Talk-us] National Forests and Private Ownership

[Bradley White]

> Not all of the land within US National Forests is owned by the US
> Government, there are private "inholdings" [1].
>
> The boundaries between government land and private land are often marked by
> signs, e.g.[2]  The above photo is geotagged, and if you drag it into JOSM
> you can see that it is quite far from the overall National Forest boundary
> as currently depicted in OSM[3].

Land actually owned and operated by the USFS is always a subset of the
jurisdictional boundary of a given NF. Near where I live, half of the
entire city of Reno is within the Humboldt-Toiyabe boundary, the
entire city of South Lake Tahoe within LTBMU, town of Truckee entirely
within Tahoe NF, etc. The jurisdictional boundaries are more or less
unhelpful in determining whether land is managed by the USFS or not.
I'm assuming this must not be the case in other parts of the country,
where the vast majority of the land within a boundary can assumed to
be owned by the USFS?

Aside from surveying boundary markers (which are inconsistently placed
and would be a logistically impossible task), the only other ways to
know what land is actually owned by the USFS is to check county parcel
data, or use the 'Surface Ownership' gdb/shp available using the USFS
Data Extract tool. In CA, we are very lucky to have the CPAD database,
which compiles the majority of public/semi-public lands into one
database, updated yearly, and free to use (see Contributors page in
OSM wiki). Where these lands also have tree cover, I tag them
'landuse=forest' and 'access=yes'. Any private "inholding" gets tagged
for what it is.