There are bunch of preserves and nature reserves around me. When I look at the ares in OSM, the areas are either super wrong or not tagged at all. How or where can someone get information regarding the boundaries for these preserves/nature reserves? Is that information open to the public?
This depends on where you live and if the administration has released the information as Open Data or not. Try a search engine to find the official information about these reserves or an open data portal of your country/state.
4 Likes
Yes, @Discostu36 is on point here. In the USA, both at the federal and state level, there are what are known as “Public Access Databases,” (PADs). These are data repositories which contain JSON, KML, shapefile data of all parks, nature preserves, etc. (what in the USA we’ve learned to call “public lands” because they are so diverse).
In my area (California), there is sometimes exactly this “problem” for OSM of not knowing quite where the boundaries of “preserves, natures reserves” (and parks, state beaches, off-highway-vehicle recreation areas…) are, so this comes in quite handy. I found myself using my statewide PAD (CPAD) to curate such polygons one-at-a-time into OSM, and this became a wiki I wrote: California/Using CPAD data - OpenStreetMap Wiki , complete with suggestions on migrating tags from its data format to OSM’s data format(s): in other words, a table-driven “tag migration” protocol. To be clear, I emphasize “one at a time,” as I have not done (and do not recommend doing) a full import of the entire dataset for many good reasons.
See if this helps you and feel free to copy from it to possibly write your own wiki for your own (local, regional) version of such “tag migration” for using public data like this. Obviously, these data must be ODbL-compatible, but that’s nearly always the case in the USA (always true at the federal level, usually true at the state level). Your mileage may vary.
1 Like
You might checkout https://gisdata-njdep.opendata.arcgis.com/ I’m not sure what their copyright terms are, but they have shape files you can download that include Warren County. It’s not like you can’t email gisnet@dep.nj.gov and ask what their copyright terms are either. I’m sure they would be willing to tell you.
(BTW, this might be worth moving to the United States specific forum)
It was determined this post most appropriately belonged in the United States forum. Cheers! Best of luck in your search for information @Wild_Spike
2 Likes
So I found the PAD for a few areas I am looking for. Is there a write-up or some documentation on how to extract the boundaries to make a polygon of the area in OSM?
Found it using this source: https://www.usgs.gov/programs/gap-analysis-project/science/pad-us-help-system