For me, forestry is the production of wood, using trees. So a 'forestry
area' would include mature trees, young trees, saplings, fresh plantings
and places where the trees have been removed.
I think that is what is meant by landuse = forest
On the other hand there are areas that are covered in trees .. that are
not intended to be used for wood products, so natural=wood (or
landcover=trees) is more appropriate.
On 17/08/2015 7:45 PM, Daniel Koć wrote:
W dniu 17.08.2015 4:10, Martijn van Exel napisał(a):
But after some discussion I realized that this may be a side effect of
a different problem, namely how we tag national forests. In the US,
these seem to be tagged as landuse=forest which is only partly true:
within a National Forest, many different land uses can occur, only one
of them being forest.
We had the same problem with imports of national forests in Poland.
It's exactly the counterintuitive problem you've mentioned: forest
area is not always covered with trees! In our case that was probably
just areas being property of the national forest operator "Lasy
Państwowe" (which is the same as "National Forests" by coincidence =} ).
So should we just not tag National Forests as landuse=forest?
We started redrawing the boundaries, so the forest is just the ground
truth (only the trees), but now I'm not sure that was the best action
to take, even if simple and useful. Somebody lately said, that the
forest area may include burned areas, young trees fields and other
such things. I'm not into the forestry, but it looks we have the
opportunity to redefine our trees/forest tags, starting from general
understanding what the forest really is and what parts it consists of.
While discussions about landcover=trees are useful, they are way too
narrow. I feel we need to rethink the whole tree tagging in OSM,
because we have no general agreement on the subject:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Forest
The whole issue is not as straightforward as one can reasonably
expect. According to Wikipedia:
"A forest is a large area of land covered with trees or other woody
vegetation.[1] Hundreds of more precise definitions of forest are used
throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree
height, land use, legal standing and ecological function.[2][3][4]
According to the widely-used[5][6] United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization definition, forests covered an area of four billion
hectares (15 million square miles) or approximately 30 percent of the
world's land area in 2006.[4]"
The FAO definition is linked:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y4171e/y4171e10.htm
and it has about 17 pages on my screen. Actually it's rather good that
it is so comprehensive, because it may be a good base for
understanding the background and to identify parts we may be
interested in. Another idea is to research common GIS practices
regarding trees.
Anybody willing to get deeper into the subject?
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