[OSM-talk] new mailing list request - OSM outdoor/natural phenomena mapping

[Richard Z.]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 04:59:17PM +0100, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 March 2014, Richard Z. wrote:
> > > >climatic zones
> > > >vegetation zones
> > > >soil biology
> > > >vegetation layers
> > >
> > > Are any of these things verifiable?
> >
> > of course. Tons of literature about it.
> 
> That is not what verifiability is about.  Climate and Vegetation 
> characteristics are generally continuously changing properties and the 
> specific zone limits defined by some convention are not usually 
> verifiable in the field.  In case of climate zones you would for 
> example need long term measurements at a certain place to determine if 
> it belongs to a certain climate zone and even if you have that you 
> cannot say anything about the climate of other locations - hence you 
> cannot draw a boundary in a verifiable way.
> 
> I explained this in case of deserts (probably the most prominent attempt 
> to map something like this in OSM) some time ago in 
> 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:natural%3Ddesert

oh yes. You can say the same about a forrest and almost anything in the 
real world.
When does a forrest have dense enough trees to be called a forrest and how tall 
should a tree be to be called a tree instead of bush? Is an Iowa tall grass prairie 
a kind of grasland?

Despite your opinion some areas are known as deserts while others are
known as lakes, rivers, grasland and forrest.

And of course there are well known and widely accepted climatic zones characterisations
such as

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification

Richard