On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Tim Berners-Lee <ti...@w3.org> wrote:
> I'd like to propose a tag for conservation land -  land protected from
> development.
> There was no alternative for tis tag in the thousands of areas which
> CRSchmidt
> imported recently from the Mass GIS database of open space in Massachusetts.
>
> Details below and on the wiki at:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/conservation
>
> Tim Berners-Lee

It's very useful that this is being worked on, currently we have a
multitude of tags for conservation-ish areas, including:

boundary=national_park
landuse=nature_reserve
landuse=national_park
landuse=conservation

Internationally different countries may have different areas which may
be applicable to this proposal in partly or fully although they're
generally thought of as conservation areas. To name an example I'm
familiar with Iceland has several categories of conservation areas:

Þjóðlenda (literally: "nation-land"): An are owned by the government
outside (or with severely restricted) private property, de-facto
protected from development although there are exceptions, like the
national road network, power lines, mountain huts etc. These have been
created from an effort of cataloging private property in the country
with conservation as an incidental afterthought.

Fólkvangar: Designated areas maintained by municipalities intended for
outdoor and recreational use, not inherently protected from
development although most are.

Friðlönd: Natural reserves intended to protect significant local flora
and fauna. Not protected from development as long as that purpose
isn't interfered with. For example Vatnsfjörður is a whole fjord
declared as a reserve but has roads, a hotel and other development.

Náttúrvætti: Mini-conservation areas intended to protect a specific
feature, like a crater, waterfall, lake etc.

Þjóðgarður (National park): distinguished from the previous three
essentially by being big, having a council that takes care of it, a
park ranger etc.

I think that regardless of your proposal it would be very useful to
start an effort to collate the different types of conservation areas
within different national boundaries across the planet, similar to the
effort going on for boundaries themselves:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:boundary#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries

Based on that we might find more common denominators which could be
turned into official tags and recommended for use for the entire
planet.
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