[OSM-talk] Details about wooded belt in Saratov Oblast?

[Ilya Zverev]

osm.fjf at 0sg.net:
>
> today, using the OSM slippy map, I came across a regular structure in
> the Saratov Oblast, Russia. Map data and aerial images suggest it be
> wood or stripes of wood. It looks like a barrier. Against what or 
> whom?
> Or when was it grown?

Hi! Sadly there is no English version of that wiki page, but you can 
read about that and other forest belts using google translation: 
http://tinyurl.com/windforest . Those forest belts were planted in 
Soviet era for protection against wind erosion, like Christoph has 
guessed.

> By the way, there are similar structures smaller in width around 
> Samara.
> And there is a nice M-character at position 45.5352 N, 43.0252 E. It 
> has
> no counterpart in aeral images, neither Google's nor Bing's, and 
> seems
> to have been part of a bigger formation of alphabetic characters 
> become
> landscape (just west of it remnants can be seen). Vandalism?

It is not vandalism, but selectively mapped farm lands. There are too 
many farms, and a mapper chose to draw only those that form the letter. 
There have been such cases in other resions, and mappers generally don't 
object to such "art", considering anyone can map more farmlands to erase 
a symbol.

IZ