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

[Andrew Ayre]

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.

I.e. the only clear boundary of the forest is the administrative 
boundary, not what it looks like on the ground.

Andy

Barnett, Phillip wrote:
> +1
> 
> I believe the real problem was in the original creation of the tag, landuse = forest. This should, in my opinion, have been landuse = forestry, which would then have enabled the natural = wood tag to be used at the same time, or even natural = forest
> 
> 
> Also, from Wikipedia,
> 
> "A forest is an area with a high density of trees" .... "Forests are differentiated from woodlands by the extent of canopy coverage: in a forest, the branches and the foliage of separate trees often meet or interlock, although there can be gaps of varying sizes within an area referred to as forest. A woodland has a more continuously open canopy, with trees spaced further apart, which allows more sunlight to penetrate to the ground between them."
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 
> 
> 
> PHILLIP BARNETT
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> -----Original Message-----
> 
> From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Tom Chance
> Sent: 20 July 2009 15:43
> To: talk at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: [OSM-talk] Do we care if its forest or wood? Natural world mapping ...
> 
> 
> So putting to one side arguments about the inherent value of trees, British
> arboreal imperialism and Xybot tricks...
> 
> Why do we care if something is a wood or a forest? Why do we care whether
> or not it's managed, and whether we all have the same sense of what
> "managed" means?
> 
> Back in the good old days of stream vs river there was a clear need for
> maps to distinguish between them. We now have a nice range of water
> features from riverbank and river to stream and drain.
> 
> Surely the basic, universal need is "there are some trees here, they're
> called Sherwood Forest"? Evoke natural=wood (lakes and beaches also fall in
> between managed and unmanaged land but are marked as natural)
> 
> In addition you can add in:
> 
> * type=deciduous (so we can all see what sorts of trees to expect)
> * landuse=forestry (so we know if it's managed for commercial reasons)
> 
> I'd really like to nominate someone like Nick Whitelegg as Countryside Tsar
> for a day, so he could work out the different basic features we need to
> know about in the countryside and an appropriate tagging schema. Then, as
> always, a combination of wiki documentation, Mapnik & Tiles at Home rules,
> Xybot mischief and peer education could disseminate this sensible approach.
> 
> Every time I try to map a walk up a hill I get depressed by the lack of
> comprehensible tags supported by renderers to get the map anywhere near as
> useful as Ordnance Survey.
> 
> Regards,
> Tom
> 
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-- 
Andy
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