I'm well in favour of mapping nature reserves, but they usually are quite difficult to find actual boundaries.
Nick Whitlegg and I walked through a couple of Woodland Trust areas on Saturday and working out the extent of the area owned by the WT is difficult. Similarly, over another non-OSM matter, I've been exchanging emails with NT Eastern Office about Wicken Fen, but they have added so much new land over the past few years that they dont have a ready to use map of the reserve. Another one is the new RSPB reserve at Medmerry near Selsey, which is the site of a massive managed retreat and new sea wall breach. This was brought to my attention by Liz Scott (@birdmaps). Lastly, I haven't even resolved the bounds of Attenborough NR: the staff now manage the area in Derbyshire labelled Erewash Field <http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/229705879> on OSM. I don't know if it has been formally incoriporated into the reserve, so the current mapping is a sensible compromise (and yes Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust operate a reserve in Derbyshire). There are Natural England datasets for National NRs, Local NRs and SSSIs. I think these are under OGL these days, but like PRoW or Land Registry inspire data, they may incorporate OS MasterMap data, and I have always treated them as not fully open. Some local authorities have open data showing boundaries of LNRs. Note that NR & SSSI boundaries are often not coincident. NRs depend on either landowner agreement, or willingness to sell land; SSSIs are based on conservation importance. And of course, some NRs have geological SSSIs in their midst which are much smaller than the NR. The second thing which is really important for NRs is to get path networks and access mapped out. Experience shows that even if one wants to start mapping the things the NR is about, having the paths in is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a decent map. Many NRs are very deficient from this point of view (including the big ancient woodlands S of Coventry, such as Wappenbury & Ryton, the last of which I visited at end of August. Similarly both Wyre Forest & Werneth Low which I visited in September lack many paths. There's a lot more to say about NRs, I have already started a draft for the blog to do so inspired by looking at Medmerry. My feeling is that the most value can be added to OSM by improving details of NRs local to individual mappers, and initially, at least path networks (there are probably 10+ km of unmapped paths in Ryton Wood alone). One other plea, please don't map areas of grass as meadows unless you know them to be meadows: Dudley wrote something about this in the past. Regards, Jerry On 5 October 2015 at 08:39, Brian Prangle <bpran...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone > > For the remainder of 2015 lets concentrate on Nature Reserves > > Regards > > Brian > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-GB mailing list > Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb > >
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