Unfortunately the magnifying glass is hidden away someplace so my old microprint copy of the Oxford English Dictionary is hard to read. I see “An extensive tract of land covered with trees and undergrowth, sometimes intermingled with pasture.”, Or “A woodland district, usually belonging to the king, set apart for hunting wild beasts and game, etc.” Or “A wild uncultivated waste, a wilderness”. But I don’t see any inference that UK English implies forest is specifically associated with timber production or logging. And from everyday use in the US I know that forest does not imply timber production. For example there is little or no logging in the forests in the mountains of Southern California (in or out of the administrative boundaries of the US Forest Service).
Yet the OSM wiki says landuse=forest is "For areas with a high density of trees primarily grown for timber.” From postings on tagging lists, the timber production seems to be a continental European interpretation and appears to be part of our semantic issue. It seems to me that the “landuse=forest” tag should go away. For timber production it ought to be something like “landuse=timber” if it is being used for timber production. The “natural” tag has the implication that mankind has not interfered with the the ecosystem. An area may be scrub or grass covered now because of over harvesting of trees in prehistoric times (Easter Island comes to mind). Is that a “natural” thing or the result of a former human land use? Landcover strikes me as a much more manageable tag for describing what is on the ground to the average mapper. I see trees, grassland or scrub. I can tag that. It may not be obvious if it is or was at one time actively managed for timber, cattle or watershed so “landuse” and/or “natural” are harder for the citizen mapper to tag. For US National Forest boundaries, I’d like to see the “landuse=forest” go away because currently implies logging which also implies actually having trees which is often not the case in the US West and Southwest. If an area of a forest is actually used for timber production then it should be so tagged, but to make it clear that forest !== timber, the “landuse=forest” tag ought to be deprecated and replaced with a more specific term. My $0.02 > On Aug 17, 2015, at 11:39 AM, Martijn van Exel <m...@rtijn.org> wrote: > > If we end up opting to maintain current landuse=forest tagging for national > forests, then we may create a MapRoulette challenge to highlight all 'forest > internal' way features and have folks convert them into inner members of the > NF multipolygon. > > As I said before, I am just trying to ease the discussion along by removing > the tag from a well-defined selection of national forests. I will personally > reinstate them if we all agree that it's not the right thing to do. > > Martijn van Exel > skype: mvexel > > On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 12:20 PM, Joel Holdsworth <j...@airwebreathe.org.uk> > wrote: > > It worked before, it can work this way again. > > It worked to some degree, but it was rather a road-block to adding more > detail. It won't every be possible to produce a detailed image like this: > > http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/49.1850/7.9723 > > ...when the whole administrative area is clobbered with green. > > Joel > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
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