Hi to everyone. Here on the island of Crete there are many beautiful national parks. 2x examples below
I highly recommend them for anyone visiting.
I have noticed that instead of the areas being marked as say,“Preveli National park” or “Samaria National Park” somebody has entered the name of the authority that administers the park in the centre of the area as if this is the name of the area. It is not. The name of the admin authority is “interesting” but surely the prominence should be the park name? To add further confusion it is possible that some of these details are incorrect and I have seen them on apps “transliterated” into english with german inflections!! example “δήμος”(dimos municipality) written as "dimon"No such pronunciation exists to my knowledge.
I will be going to the forestry commission personally very soon (who are responsible for administering these parks) to obtain the correct names and to check boundaries. After I complete this if it is found incorrect-
1/How do I alter the name to read the actual name of the park which is far more important.
2/Should the boundary Line be added in with the relevant authority “around the edge of the boundary not in the centre of it” and if so how do I do this?
If this prove true I would like to do this myself with some help from the community
Thank You
I assume this is the relation for the first example:
There is only one name tag, set to Πρέβελη Δήμων Φοίνικα και Λάμπης
If that is the incorrect value you are referring to, you should be able to simply set it to the name by which the park or reserve is really known. You could use another tag such as operator to retain the information about the authority.
There is one odd thing about that relation - the tagging seems to have been confused with an information board. You might want to remove tourism=information and related tags information= and board_type= - they make no sense on an object representing a large area. Of course you could add any information boards separately at their true locations.
There are no foreign language names tagged on this object in OSM, so any transliterated names you see must be generated outside OSM.
Looking at this relation, it’s the same situation. Again there are tags for an information board that don’t appear to make sense. No idea what has been going on here. But I don’t think it affects what is being displayed.
About the names, because I don’t have the legislation in front of me right now, I think refer to the administrative units that contained those areas that were applicable at the time (“Kapodistrias” administrative reform and prior), and those were in the official names per legislation. The operator isn’t actually the municipalities themselves, but the regions.
Again, I don’t have the legislation that created those protected areas/national parks in front of me right, that’s just my speculation because that’s how similar protected areas near me work.
Before you proceed with any edits, better wait for someone else from the Greek community to give a proper reply about what is about those areas and how they should be named, just to be safe.
(You know there’s a Greek category in this forum, right? For issues specifically about Greek data, you should ask there for relevant guidance.)
I agree with jimkats that posting this in the Greek category would have beought it to the attention of more mappers that could help.
I think what we see here is a conflation of national parks (in Greek, Εθνικοί Δρυμοί) with other types of nature reserves, which have different naming schemes and are usually not very accessible to the public, and as such have “unfriendly”, bureacratic names. I think most of the examples here shown are Καταφύγια Άγριας Ζωής (ΚΑΖ). A rough english translation would be Wildlife Refuges. Formerly these were known as Καταφύγια θηραμάτων or Game reserves. Confusingly, sometimes these overlap or are contained within Natura 2000 areas with different, similar names, but I don’t know if Natura 2000 status has legal ramifications on its own. in any case they are listed on the Natura qebsite when they overlap with Natura areas under the names they have in OSM (usually). A lot of these KAZ are hard to Google precisely because the most accesible usage of this naming scheme is OSM itself and derived datasets, as opposed to obscure, old, often non digitised legislation that was not intended to be facing the public.
In fewer words, Preveli has no national park.
The Samaria National Park is mapped here. I have no idea why whoever made it chose this obscure name intead of the more well known one. It belongs in alt_name at best. As you can see, it hasn’t been touched in 8 years.
Greek nature reserve mapping, as many things, is marred by a bureacratic nightmare of varying jurisdictions and legal statuses, so most mappers probably steer clear of it to remain sane.
Thank you kindly to both you and Jimkats.I am relatively new to mapping and take each step very carefully and seriously to try and have the best possible result. The next time I will post in the Greek section as you suggested.
Unfortunately due to illness I haven’t been able to get to the Forestry Commission this week but I hear you loud and clear about the naming of the areas. I will get some further information when I go next week and then I should be in a confident position to make any edits. I do have a leaflet somewhere saying Samaria National Park and that came from the forestry commission who have some legal authority to administer all of this. I am sure that some of these areas can be improved and I will have a better knowledge of what to do if I come across this again.cheers
I agree that Samaria National Park should be the main name, as seen for example on their website. Do tell what you find after going to the Forestry Commission!
Hi to anyone interested.
I was at the Greek Forestry commission a few days ago. Much of the info above Is correct. It was agreed that the name of the “Samaria National Park” should obviously be “Samaria National Park.” One area that does not contain all the white mountains should not be named as white mountains as if this is the main representative name of the National Park .
The Preveli Area discussed is not listed under the national parks even though it is commonly perceived as such .The agreed acceptable name was “preveli wildlife refuge”. My humble opinion is that “nature reserve” might be a better representative in print but wildlife refuge is closer to the original Greek ethos so that goes.It was agreed that for mapping purposes the administering authorities are not what should be prominently displayed. When the site is back up and running I shall make the edits I will drop you a line if I need any help. Thanks to everyone who offered advice and help.
I think the current name could be reasonably moved to official_name, and have Preveli Wildlife Refuge as the value name:en, and Κέντρο Άγριας Ζωής Πρεβέλης in name. It may be worth a discussion with the rest of the Greek community to figure out the tagging in other ΚΑΖ (wildlife refuges) and national parks as well, and maybe write something up on the wiki.
On further review, there is proper tagging for this stuff in OSM:
protection_title (in this case, Wildlife Refuge) and protect_class.
These generally also would have boundary=protected_area.
There seems to have been some effort to standardise tagging nature reserve tagging in Greece by @ika-chan back in 2019, I believe mostly with this changeset. Her input would be pretty useful, whenever she happens to read this.
That’s very helpful I will give it a try when we are back online and see how it all looks
ika-chan
(Sharks with laser beams attached to their heads!)
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I would support an increase in efforts to standardise protected areas in Greece, because some instances like this one have incorrect tagging such as information=wild_life, which is meant for information points.