Proposed import: Middlebury College trees

Communities United States
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Hello folks, I’m planning an import of trees on the Middlebury College campus as documented in the here:

The Middlebury College arborist maintains a GIS database of campus trees with a wealth of data including species, diameter, height, spread, among other information. A public view of this data is available at: https://sites.middlebury.edu/middland/campus-tree-map/

I’ve completed other larger imports and am familiar with the process, but I’d particularly like feedback on the proposed tagging of the species/taxon details as there are two overlapping tagging schemes in somewhat wide use.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

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Hi Adam,

Glad to see the List of species table I created it’s useful :smiley:
Some comments based on the Tagging Plans table:

  • species:en and taxon:en values are the same. In such cases I would omit taxon:en, since is just duplicated info.
  • I would omit taxon:family as well. I would tag it only if more specific taxa data (genus and/or species) is missing (are there any cases like this?).
  • I would omit taxon:genus (only 7.596 uses). It’s just a duplicate of genus (1.627.616).
  • height=48', why not converting it to meters (the standard unit as wiki) before importing it? :eyes:
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Thanks for the feedback! The taxon* schema seems a bit more fleshed out than species=* and genus=*, but I see your point about duplication.

I’m planning to leave the dimensions in feet & inches as those are the measurements used in practice in forestry in the US and are how the units recorded. While I could convert to meters the question then becomes one of what decimal place to round to and the values become more difficult for mappers to validate or adjust over time since no one in our region uses meters in practice.

See RFC: Documenting feet as an an optional elevation unit for much similar reasoning for recording the units actually used in local practice. As noted in Map features/Units - OpenStreetMap Wiki , explicit specification is allowed with proper unit formatting.

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Would it make sense to tag check_date=* or some variant thereof? I’m guessing the campus trees are mostly mature, but if there are any younger trees in the dataset, the height=* and diameter=* tags could get out of date faster. Maybe it isn’t a big deal because this is all micromapping anyways?

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I certainly could add that. The dataset has a record of the dates that the arborist last visited and evaluated the tree.

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