[OSM-talk] [Talk-us] Mapping of State/county/national parks

Tyler tyler.ritchie at gmail.com
Thu Jun 25 22:02:10 BST 2009


>
> Why is landuse=forest not appropriate for parks/forests with the same uses
> but with a "lower" administrative classification?  landuse=forest is for
> managed land with trees on it regardless of who manages it.
>

Because they often aren't forests. (I said similar use)

Sometimes they're scrubland, beach, plains, dunes, rocky craginess,
volcanos, river deltas... The list goes on and on. I take landuse=forest to
mean a managed forest meaning they're harvesting trees, moss or whatever,
such as many state natural resource department's forest land or the National
Forest lands (excluding wilderness areas) in the United states. And often
parks at lower administrative classifications are set aside for recreation,
not natural preservation or for logging, farming, grazing or harvesting any
natural resources.

As the case is in coastal states, there are coastal state parks consisting
solely of beaches, and in the southwest of the United States there are state
parks consisting solely of desert.

Additionally landuse=forest doesn't accurately portray all of the Bureau of
Land Managements lands--which account for 1/8th of the area of the US, of
which landuse=forest is only appropriate for ~20%. It also would be
entirely inappropriate for the United States National Grasslands, which are
like the National Forests in almost every aspect, except that they are
grasslands (and tagging them as such doesn't distinguish them from
surrounding non-public use/recreation grasslands).

I'm all for using existing tagging schemes, but the vast majority of land in
the United States and Canada classified as "parks" aren't of the form
leisure=park. Personally, I would classify what is leisure=park
(manicured greenery with duckponds and funnel cake vendors) as urban
parks.

-Tyler
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