[Talk-us] National Forest boundaries

[Bradley White]

> However, I'm not exactly sure how the outer polygons found in NFs differ from either the "Congressional" boundary or the one Bradley says he would tag "boundary=administrative" (and I don't think we should tag it that, especially while excluding a specific value for admin_level), but I'm willing to listen to more discussion about what this "different from Congressional" boundary is and how the two differ.  Apologies if that isn't clear, I'm doing my best, but I remain unclear on some concepts here.

NF congressionally designated boundary, minus private inholdings (more
specifically, non-USFS-owned land), gives you the boundary of land
that is actually managed and protected by the USFS. This boundary
should be tagged with 'protect_class=6'. USFS owned land is always a
subset of this congressional boundary (I suspect it is, in all cases
in the US, a proper subset). Subtracting these private inholdings is
generally going to change the shape of the 'outer' way such that it no
longer is the same as the "designated" boundary.

> My slight disagreement with Bradley is as above:  I don't think we should put a "naked" (missing admin_level) boundary=administrative tag on these, it simply feels wrong to do that.  (I READ the point that these are "Congressionally designated" and that SEEMS administrative...but, hm...).

I wasn't clear in what I meant by suggesting 'boundary=administrative'
tagging here - I don't think we should tag "declared" boundaries
'boundary=administrative' with no 'admin_level'. This is simply the
closest widely-used tag that comes close to representing what this
"declared" boundary actually means. This is also why I suggest we
think about not including it at all in OSM; should we also start
adding boundaries for interstate USFS administrative regions (an
'admin_level', for lack of a better term, more general than a NF
boundary), as well as ranger districts within each national forest?

The real, on-the-ground objects of importance here are the plots of
land that are actually owned and operated by the USFS, not an
administrative boundary that declares where each national forest *may*
legally be authorized to own and manage land, and that is not
surveyable on the ground.