This can get pretty complicated, with the way USFS manages its land: they manage two boundaries....lands that are owned by the USFS, and private lands they manage (e.g. game lands, conservation easements...). Each unit within a forest can have a different management plan (roadless, timber, wildland). This could lead OSM mappers to come to different interpretations of the various boundaries within a USFS unit and possibly lead to several large green areas of different shades, Commodore 64 Style. For example, a NPS unit will typically have 12 land use management categories, the important one being wilderness. It'd be pretty chaotic to try to tag a park boundary 12 different ways to encompass those land uses, not to mention ticking off any one trying to render a simple park boundary.
I'd download the USFS boundaries geodatabase from their web site. No help on tagging, though. I suspect, for simplicity sake, OSMers would want a single tag for a contiguous USFS boundary. Personally, I'd like to see USFS (and BLM, NPS, etc) unit boundaries tagged as an administrative boundaries, which is, in fact, what they are, regardless of the land use status within that boundary. Might be a good idea to update the Wiki page on this topic and/or add a proposed new tag, or tag change. -----Original Message----- From: Torsten Karzig [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 3:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Talk-us] misuse of the landuse=forest tag for national forests I am relatively new to the talk-us list and have a question concerning the landuse tags of national forests. Right now (at least in southern california) all national forests are landuse=forest which leads to large green areas on the map which look like they originate from a very old video game with giant pixels. The boundaries of the national forest often have nothing to do with the actual landuse=forest/natural=wood boundaries. I would therefore vote for deleting the landuse tag [and map it separately] leaving the national forests only as protected_areas. Before doing this change I would like to have your input/opinion on the topic. I know that this should actually not be a concern but does anybody know whether protected areas of level 6 (like national forests) are rendered? (if not this might be a reason for the initial landuse=forest tag, although this is clearly mapping for the renderer) One more thing: When I look at the definition of the OSM map features it seems that natural=wood seems to be a better tag. But this depends a bit on the interpretation whether landuse=forest is used for land that is primarily managed for timber production or for woodland that is in some way maintained by humans. Torsten _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
