[Talk-us] National Forest boundaries

[Adam Franco]

>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 1:40 AM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
>
A refinement, perhaps Bradley and others agree with me, perhaps not.
>
> A USFS NF is a "virtual" multipolygon (not one in OSM, we can get to that
> later) of three kinds of things:
>
> 1) An "outer" (but not the biggest one) which is "the enclosing land which
> USFS manages, except for inholdings, below,"
> 2) Zero to many "inner" polygons, representing inholdings (and with the
> usual "hole" semantic of exclusion from 1), above and
> 3) An even LARGER and ENCLOSING of 1) "outer" which Congress declares is
> the geographic extent to which USFS may or might "have influence to someday
> manage."
>
> If we ignore 3) as "not real, but rather aspirational or in the future
> rather than the present, and certainly not on-the-ground" then an OSM
> multipolygon consists of simply 1) plus 2).
>

I think this is correct.

The difference between the "aspirational/congressionally mandated" area (3)
and the owned/managed area (1-2) my local NF (Green Mountain National Forest
<https://www.fs.fed.us/ivm/index.html?minx=-8617801&miny=5197482&maxx=-8030765&maxy=5499255&exploremenu=yes>)
is dramatic. Both are complex shapes, but the (1-2) area is immensely
fragmented and rarely aligned with the (3) area. The (3) boundary is mostly
useful for low-zoom maps to show an approximation of the NF region -- it is
pretty meaningless for high-zoom usage (in my opinion).

If there is consensus on dropping (3), then a system for mapping NFs as
(1-2) should be possible to figure out. That said, how that OSM object is
assembled and tagged may be tricky. In the Green Mountain National forest
the (1-2) area contains a large mix of areas with different protections
<https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5289735.pdf>
(detail map). I would imagine that the parent NF object that has the name
"Green Mountain National Forest" would contain members that had
protect_class=6 (resource extraction), protect_class=1b (wilderness),
protect_class=5 (recreation areas, Appalation Trail corridor), etc. Some of
these child boundaries would have their own names and additional tags,
others not.

I'm not sure what tagging would be appropriate for the NF object itself
maybe these as a starting point?

   - name=*
   - boundary=national_park
   - operator=US Forest Service
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