[Talk-us] National Forests and Private Ownership

[Bradley White]

> I downloaded a quad (geotiff) for part of the area in question and pulled it into QGIS.  It generally agrees with the county land ownership information, with the exception that some state lands are shown on the quad as owned by the Federal Government.  Perhaps this is an error in one of the datasets.

As far as I understand (and tag), the owned lands should be tagged as
landuse (generally, landuse=forest, access=yes, operator=xxx National
Forest), but the administrative boundary is something different from
that. From what I see in parts of the SE (looking specifically at
Chattahoochee-Oconee, Nantahala, etc area), the administrative
boundary multipolygon is around *only* USFS owned lands. I would
consider this tagging style incorrect, and largely the exception
relative to the rest of the US.

>The Fee Owned is a a subset of the Congressionally Mandated boundaries as someone else explained. My unofficial suggestion is if you want to model recreation, it would be better to show the Fee Owned boundaries so people don't end up on private lands. The US Topo uses proclaimed at this time.

Proclaimed boundaries are the administrative boundaries, and should be
tagged with "boundary" tags as they are in most of the US. Actual
owned land (fee owned) is a matter of landuse and should be tagged
using landuse tags. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily show
distinctly on the main OSM slippy map. However, this is a generic map
that is not *necessarily* designed to be useful for any one specific
thing, and trying to show different ownership of land can get messy
very fast. The data in the OSM database should reflect the distinction
between designated administrative boundaries and actual managed forest
land, regardless of whether this shows nicely on the slippy map.

If the goal is to see clearly what land is actually owned by the USFS,
then it is likely better to either use the USFS topo maps, or develop
your own map style that shows the difference!