On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 1:46 AM Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > In American English, especially in the west, the word “meadow” is used for > areas in the high mountains which grow grasses, sedges, annual wildflowers > etc in the summer months after the snow melts. They might occasionally be > used to graze cattle as rangeland, but usually are only graced by elk. > > I think these would be called a “fell” in parts of Britain, but they are > somewhat similar to alpine meadows / pastures in the Swiss/Austrian alps, > where dairy cattle graze in the summer. Those really are pastures or hay > meadows, so perhaps Americans we got that usage from Swiss and Austrian > immigrants, and applied it to mountain grasslands? > > I agree that alpine “meadows” should be tagged natural=grassland, but don’t > be surprised to find some mapped as “landuse=meadow” in the mountains of > California and Colorado.
There are also 'wet meadows' - wetlands with sodden soil, but with neither standing water nor tree cover. I've seen the scrubby ones called 'laurel meadows' or 'alder meadows' according to the plant community. And there are 'ice meadows' along rivers and streams, where there's no tree or shrub cover because the banks are swept with ice in the spring floods - they have their own community of low-growing plants that can tolerate that treatment and are often found nowhere else. Yes, these should be tagged as `natural=wetland wetland=wet_meadow`. or `natural=scrub`, or (I can't find a good tag for ice meadows but haven't tried to map any yet). -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
