[OSM-talk] Do we care if its forest or wood? Natural worldmapping ...

[Mike Harris]

Prefer

Landuse=forestry (not 'forest') and natural=woodland; maybe also a tag for
the administrative areas such as US National Forests. Then other tags can
take care of the detail. 

Mike Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: David Lynch [mailto:djlynch at gmail.com] 
Sent: 20 July 2009 19:10
To: Tom Chance
Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Do we care if its forest or wood? Natural
worldmapping ...

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:59, Tom Chance<tom at acrewoods.net> wrote:
> On Monday 20 Jul 2009 17:08:30 Andrew Ayre wrote:
>> I've been adding the national forests in Arizona, and the Wikipedia 
>> definition doesn't fit too well. There are areas here that are inside 
>> an administrative boundary called a National Forest where the trees 
>> are very sparse - 10s of meters between them. Elsewhere in the forest 
>> the trees are dense but it is a gradual transition from sparse to 
>> dense that could take 50 miles or more to travel through.
>
> The point is that we won't ever find a useful correspondence between 
> real "out there in the world" uses of "Forest" and "Wood" (which are 
> already very inconsistent), everyone's individual perceptions of the 
> difference, dictionary / encyclopedia / professional definitions, and 
> the reality of the slightly chaotic OSM tagging.
>
> The division of landuse and natural, forest and wood, is utterly
pointless.
>
> Hence my proposal to only use natural=wood, and allow further tags to 
> designate the type of tree, whether it's used for commercial logging, etc.

IMO, national forests fall into a third category, which neither your
proposal nor current tagging covers - land which is designated by government
as a forest which is preserved or managed under special restrictions. The
trees don't necessarily stop at the boundary, and it is possible that there
are areas within the boundary which aren't covered in dense trees. It
probably needs some kind of boundary=____ tag.

I'm also thinking that deprecating both landuse=forest and natural=wood
might be a good idea if this goes forward. Replace it with natural=trees,
which is just as self-explanitory, and which (to this particular mapper)
sounds like a better fit for small clumps of <10 trees than "wood."
--
David J. Lynch
djlynch at gmail.com