On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 3:14 PM stevea <stevea...@softworkers.com> wrote:
> Here I weigh-in with what I believe to be a crucial distinction between > "cadastral data which are privately owned" and "data which can be > characterized as cadastral, but which are publicly owned and are often used > for recreation, hiking and similar human activities." > 'Private' vs 'public' hits near the mark, but not in the gold. I was trying to be precise when I said that the property line determines the protected status and the public access constraints. A public-access nature reserve operated by an NGO (such as a private conservancy or land trust - there are quite a few in my part of the world) deserves the same treatment as a government-run one. What we discuss here is the particular (peculiar?) example of national > forests in the USA, where there are effectively "two legal boundaries, one > actual ownership, another potential ownership." There's a nearly parallel situation in New York, where the 'potential ownership' in the Adirondack and Catskill Parks is, in effect, the entirety of those parks. In that case, though, the outer boundary is indeed signed, affects zoning to a tremendous extent, and realtors will make it quite clear that a property is in (or is not in) the park. (It's parallel to several national parks in the UK, and I've gotten affirmation from a number of prominent UK mappers that these two are properly `boundary=national_park`.) Within these two parks, there are a great many Wild Forests and Wilderness Areas and Intensive Use Areas and New York City Watershed Recreation Areas and a zoo of other things that are owned by one government or another. They, too, are mapped, since they have protection status different from the park as a whole, and since they are the public-access portions of the park. (They account for something like half the land area - and we're talking a pretty huge swath; the Adirondack Park has about the same land area as the State of Massachusetts.) Wilderness and Intensive Use Areas tend to have fairly compact borders (in topology, not in size!) High Peaks https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360488 and West Canada Lakes https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360511 are the largest, and as you can see, they have few inholdings or transportation corridors. Wild Forest areas (a slightly less restrictive classification) are ordinarily a lot more diffuse, with patchworks of public and private holdings. They include messes like Saranac Lakes https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6362702 and Wilcox Lake https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360587 <https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360587#map=10/43.3696/-74.0561>. While the classification of any land being added to the Forest Preserve goes through a public notice and comment period, I'm sure that someone in the Adirondack Park Agency has on the drawing board a sketch that says, 'any conservation land that comes into our hands in *this* area will be added to *that* wild forest', but that's not proclaimed the way it is with National Forests. As diffuse as they are, these are the areas that have public access, and `protect_class=1b` (or whatever the protection class of any given area is). The cadastre determines the land use and protection status. We absolutely should agree (here? now?) on which of these two (or both) we > enter into OSM. The current situation of data in our map is scattered > between the two and still confused in the minds of many mappers who do or > wish to enter these data. Since we agree they should be entered, let's > better discuss how we enter them "properly" (by achieving consensus) and > watch as they render according to our hammered-out-here agreements on how > this should and will best take place. We really are getting closer to > doing this, thanks to excellent discussion here. With the two great parks of New York, we've mapped both the outer bounds - which are consistently signed, at least on the highways - and the bounds of the state-owned conservation land - which are also signed. With the National Forests, it's much less clear. Ordinarily the signage does NOT follow the proclaimed boundary - there are no National Forest signs in the middle of Reno - but rather are posted at the first actual Forest Service parcel that a road encounters. The markings for the individual protected parcels are more subtle, but they're there. Generally, the proclaimed boundary is NOT visible in the field. (By contrast, there *are* Adirondack Park signs on streets in Glens Falls/Queensbury, Corinth, Broadalbin, Mayfield, .... even in the villages) I don't mind mapping the proclaimed areas of National Forests, but it's hard to come up with an appropriate tag since the proclamation has so little actual effect. The actual owned areas are definitely significant and I do *not* want to give them up. My belief is that the conservation easements - the intermediate category - would be nothing but clutter if rendered on a general-purpose map, but if someone wants to map them with protect_class=14 or something, I wouldn't kick. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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