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

Jason Cunningham jamicubat at googlemail.com
Sat Aug 8 23:17:00 BST 2009


Since I joined the OSM community to map an area of woodland I help manage,
the use of  "landuse=forest and natural=wood" has frustrated me. I had meant
to raise the issue and to try and find out whether it was possible to
improve these tags. I had actually planned to do this month so its a shame I
missed the start of this discussion.

Wood and Forest have not had clear definitions for centuries in the UK, and
as Mike Harris states the trees within Forests were incidental (the famous
Sherwood Forest was mostly heathland). Mike Harris also supplies the
solution that has been used for years to describe areas of land dominated by
trees, the word is "Woodland". If you wish to learn more on the subject of
areas of land covered in trees I suggest reading the following book
"Woodlands - Oliver Rackham" (amazon
link<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woodlands-New-Naturalist-Oliver-Rackham/dp/0007202431>
)

Looking at the discussion Mike Harris has already suggested the tags I would
suggest, but I may as well repeat them
natural=woodland  land covered with trees (Minimum Crown Cover = 20%)
landuse=forestry

Jason Cunningham

2009/8/7 Mike Harris <mikh43 at googlemail.com>

> 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
>
>
>
>
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