Greetings,
I have a question in mind and it is whether there is any tag on the map to express the species of fish that exist in a body of water. If it doesn’t exist, it would be a shame because I think it would be very useful on the map.
Greetings and a hug!
We pretty much do not map locations of most individual species (whether plants, animals or fungi): for the most part their locations are just too ephemeral for the way OpenStreetMap has developed. The obvious exceptions are trees, woods and scrub of a given plant community, birds which nest in the same location with high fidelity (sea birds, herons, storks …). Mapping of all biota is extremely well-served by a wide range of sophisticated applications: I can recommend iNaturalist, iRecord and Obbsmap (observation.org), but there are plenty of others such as Plant.net. Much of the validated data finds it’s way to GBIF which allows a more integrated view: for instance one can look at records for Zander (or Pike-perch) which is an invasive species in the UK. Such data can readily be integrated with OSM.
The locations where it may be appropriate are lakes and ponds which are deliberately stocked, with say carp. These can be mapped themselves, usually with a leisure
key.
In the UK there are many other things which probably need mapping if you want accurate information for fishing. Many waters are private (especially for fly-fishing, salmon etc.) or require a permit (most rivers). So I’d focus first on ways to capture the basic infrastructure.
It might work to say that a fish-farm has salmon or trout in it, but I don’t think it would really be practical for normal waterways, as we don’t know what’s in there?
To my understanding we are not tagging for the renderer, the router and the fish …
I can see cases where this would be relevant, for example fishermen but also biologists/ecologists. That being said, such information would be hard to verify, can change over time (think about seasonal fish migration for example), and might lead to long lists (larger bodies of water might have many different species in them).
Before we tag fish, we should first map the oceans
I agree with @SK53 that for providing biodata other sources maybe more useful than OSM and yes, biodata are no geodata in general. Besides that the verifyability of these data OTG ranges from very poor to not possible. Again, if we start mapping fish today, tomorrow we could be discussing about wildlife population in certain areas and next bird migration routes. Not to talk about humans …
As other participants commented before, it may be ok for man made objects like fish farms or man stocked fishing ponds but I do not see any good trying that for natural waterways.
Thank you very much to all of you for solving this doubt. Finally, I want to ask you: Can other more verifiable data such as permitted seasons, mating seasons, permits, etc. be represented on the map?
Key:fishing - OpenStreetMap Wiki will cover whether you are allowed to fish in any particular spot
This is a fairly typical private fishing water local to me (note capacity tag, and we could map pegs individually). The angling club own, or at least lease the land, so I have also added the area controlled by them (but Carto-OSM doesn’t know about them, however @SomeoneElse does). Most Notts Angling places no longer seem to offer day tickets or similar, so all are private fisheries (I guess fishing=private
rather than fishing=permit
.
I’ve used similar tagging for commericial fishing lakes : Aldercar Lane, Longford Fishery, and Lake View Fishery.
I’m also probably the only person to have used man_made=fishing_pe
g, see taginfo.
Just found an example of individual fishing pegs mapped in detail, but each one with a leisure=fishing
.
fishing=member is a little odd though, although I understand that they’re saying it’s club members only.