Thanks everyone, it’s been useful to hear the wide range of thoughts. I guess I was uncertain to what degree the Aus OSM group followed the strict definitions of the OSM categories or adapted them to suit the way the terms are used locally. The way the OSM wiki page describes a swamp is very different from how we generally use the term in Australia.
Michael’s suggestion of using the forest and wetland tags as separate overlays is a useful idea. In practice, all that can be sensibly mapped in Millewa are the extreme wet and dry areas, i.e. treeless wetlands (or swamps as we tend to call them) at one extreme and the dry grasslands and some dry forests in places such as the higher sandhills. Everything else grades between these extremes, and the patterns vary enormously, often at really fine scales, and between years as evidenced by the dry Bing and wet ESRI images available to OSM. So in practice, the bulk of the forest has to be put into one category or the other (either wood or swamp) with grasslands and open wetlands as minor outliers. I’m new to OSM, so if there’s a general acceptance that the vegetation categories are somewhat flexible, then my tendency is to follow Ian’s suggestion and to map it as a forest (natural=wood) with a ‘wetland’ overlay in most places. I can then map treeless wetlands and some big wet swamps separately. Thanks again for all your feedback, it’s been really useful. Cheers Ian. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
