I see that the forest area got subdivided around paths. To me, it seems like this should’ve been one big forest with paths simply running through it, as the canopy is touching.
What are the guidelines on when a forest should stop?
In the Netherlands, a lot of that is the result of the old 3dShapes import.
There are no hard rules for this, but a general rule of thumb I usually try to follow is that if I can see the road, I’ll split the forest. If it’s a small forest path that’s completely hidden underneath the trees, I’ll just map it as one big polygon.
I would agree, if you were starting from the blank slate, i.e. the area had not been mapped before. But as it is stands now, subdivision into smaller blocks is not incorrect, and I would argue it would be a wasted (and not trivial, since no tool that I know of can automatically eliminate the gaps) effort to try and merge the areas.
Recently I’ve been working on an area where someone (long time ago) has drawn a lot of disjoint farmland and forest polygons, not even drawing the tracks between them. That’s very hard to align to new aerials and/or apply updates, but still, I’m reluctant to do much about it (besides, there’s a lot of blank map around it)…
I would not say it is a gigantic issue, or a priority fix or anything like that. But for me it is weird tagging that I would eliminate at least in part when mapping in a given area.
If areas can be outright merged then JOSM has merge area tool that can be used (create another area that covers wound between these two, put the same tags on all three, use merge area).
In iD I would remove tags from one area (and keep them in text editor), split way, and delete section, then repeatedly use (f)ollow, and restore tags. I guess similar can be done in JOSM without need for tag removal/restoration dance.
Technically, paths in forest are forest. As landuse=forestdoes not map that there are trees there, instead it maps that this area is used for forestry. Same applies to tracks there. Splitting along these is as arbitrary as splitting along meridians.
This almost sounds like Pokemon-inspired mapping (“I went to 1325 parks today”).
If there is a field of wheat and there is a highway=track (but no barrier=*), would people split it into two?
If there is an area of grass (not sufficiently sophisticated to call a park) in a residential neighbourhood, does one split the grass each time there is a footway? What if that footway is informal?
If the forest has a name, do you end up naming each individual area or do you create a vast multi-polygon?
On the original forest question, note that we do now have boundary=forest as a tag to map “forestry areas”, which makes it easier to define that separately from “here there are some trees** (and what sort of trees they are)”.
** using whichever tag you prefer to indicate that - let’s not have that discussion again please!
