I work with the Department of Emergency Services in Western Australia. We make extensive use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the basemap for our public-facing emergency information platform https://www.emergency.wa.gov.au/.
We have observed a couple of issues in the current OSM basemap rendering that we’d like to bring to your attention for consideration, particularly in relation to cartographic accuracy and alignment with Western Australia’s land administration framework.
The OpenStreetMap basemap currently includes “landuse” classifications that don’t align with the official Western Australian land tenure framework. Specifically, “Indigenous Protected Areas” (IPAs) are shown as a form of land tenure. However, IPAs are administrative agreements between the Federal Government and Aboriginal groups, primarily for funding ranger and environmental programs. They are not part of the formal land tenure system in WA. Representing them as such—especially using the same symbology as Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) managed national or conservation parks—can be misleading, particularly since many IPAs overlap existing reserves.
Additionally, from a cartographic perspective, we noticed that lakes are rendered in a blue water tone. Given that the majority of these are salt lakes and rarely contain water, this can also be visually misleading.
As a government agency, we have a responsibility to ensure that land tenure information presented to the public aligns with official WA Government datasets. We would welcome any opportunity to work with the OSM community to improve the accuracy and representation of WA land tenure and landscape features.
Any guidance on how this could be fixed would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
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Mammi71
(One feature, Six mappers and still More ways to map it)
2
Short answer from the other side of the globe:
You can fix issues in OpenStreetMap yourself. If necessary, you must observe the rules of organised editing.
Salt lakes are probably mostly dry, but can carry water after rainfall? There is a tag for this: intermittent=yes. In the base map, this is displayed as a striped area.
I can’t say anything about IPAs.
You can be of great help to the OSM community by providing data. All we need is a suitable licence or explicit permission to use it. And there are many more possibilities.
The community is very helpful. You can find the Australian community in the Oceania subforum. I will ask the help and support moderators to move your post there, as I think you will get better answers to your question there.
I see you have three different basemaps, two custom Mapbox styles where you control the styling, and one https://tile.openstreetmap.org default OpenStreetMap Carto style.
The OpenStreetMap Carto style primary purpose is to help mappers with contributing data to OSM, it’s designed to show data without too much consideration for specific use cases or audiences. OpenStreetMap strives to represent data in ways that allow data consumers flexibility to decide how they want to show things on their maps.
I think it’s correct to tag both WA National Parks and IPAs as boundary=protected_areas as (at least per https://www.niaa.gov.au/our-work/environment-and-land/indigenous-protected-areas-ipa) they both represent protected areas. boundary=protected_area is a very broad tag that includes many different types of protected areas under different legislative frameworks across the globe.
We use the protect_class key Key:protect_class - OpenStreetMap Wiki and iucn_level key Key:iucn_level - OpenStreetMap Wiki are used to try and globally classify types of protection, but it’s never going to be perfect and can’t capture all the regional variations, so I think it’s also good to try and tag protection_titleKey:protection_title - OpenStreetMap Wiki since that helps tell data consumers the specific legal designation of the protected areas in the local jurisdiction.
From all these tags you can pull apart National Parks and IPAs in Australia in OSM data.
It seems your main concern is that IPAs are rendered in the same colour/style as National Parks on the standard OSM Carto style. For a general purpose OSM default style, I don’t think it can capture all the nuances of every tag we can include, especially regional variations. For a specialist map sure you’d probably want different colours, and our tags allow for this.
I think this is where the misunderstanding arises. As a general rule we don’t map land tenure in OSM. What does get mapped in OSM is protected areas, which is a land management criterion.
As others have pointed out, how a map renderer chooses to represent areas managed for conservation purposes is one made by the designer of the map style. In this case they have chosen to use a green boundary line with directional shading.
If you want something else you will have to develop your own style, or alternatively there are businesses such as Alantgeo and others you could employ to help.
The IUCN category is a standardised way of recording the management aims for a conservation area. There are IPAs under categories II, III, IV, V, and VI, along with a range of combinations (some parts are managed differently to others).
