I am a farmer interested in (micro?)mapping farmland, hedges, hedgerow trees, field ponds, ditches, field gates, powerlines etc. across land we manage for our own utility.
There are a few topics on this already, but please could I have experienced mappers’ guidance on:
please can I map individual fields as individual multi-polygons with landuse=farmland (rather than landuse=farmland spread across many many fields (often spanning roads)
is adding names of fields appropriate? (they would not be in public use, but are generally very historic and used for generations)
how do I treat the gap between the hedge and the ditch when: a field borders a hedge, which then has a ditch behind it, which then borders a field?
many fields have underground drainage networks (land drains) which allow excess water to drain from the soil into ditches - I assume these are not appropriate to be mapped?
I would also be grateful if someone could please look at some of my changesets, and provide any feedback / criticisms.
I am very happy to make any changes / improvements as necessary.
Hi there, I’m currently mapping landuse in Ceredigion, Gwynedd and Conwy.
Please don’t use multipolygons to create landuse (unless necessary), this is because it’s unnecessary most of the time and takes a great deal to clean up - iD and JOSM have means to create areas. Personally, I draw landuse areas over multiple fields because drawing each individual field is time consuming and I don’t expect them to be edited often. It is ok to delete these (or split if you use JOSM) and redraw as individual fields for more detail.
Yes, it’s fine to add names of individual fields, provided that the source is compatible with OSM’s licence.
I can’t answer your last two questions sorry as I concentrate on landuse.
sorry - I didn’t mean multipolygons - I meant mapping fields as individual areas - compared to at the moment, where massive areas are blanket mapped with landuse=farmland
Welcome to OpenStreetMap, it sounds like some great interest you have.
Mapping fields individually is good. Mapping farmland as one big area across multiple fields is a lazy/quick way to cover the background of the Map and feels like “tagging for the rendeter” to me (which is bad), it doesn’t add a lot of value to OpenStreetMap. If you don’t connect them through a relation, you could tag them with “owner” or “operator” and a common value.
Field names is appropriate, be aware that anything on OpenStreetMap is public. I would add the tag “source:name” with a value of “local_knowledge” or something like “farm_owner”. That can be free flow text if it’s an explanation rather than a value you use repeatedly. I’ve seen signs on footpaths pointing through named fields, also explanations of path closure/detours (I believe the maps on closures can’t be used, as it’s Ordnance Survey).
Ajoining polygons can be mapped where they share nodes, or just get the nodes close by. It’s mapper preference (and following local mapper conventions). The latter is often seen as easier for beginners, but can also be good for the micromapping you tell of. Zoom in closely and you can map all the features beside themselves.
Land drains could be mapped, but I’m not sure of the tagging and it’s an opinion if it’s appropriate. You could create tagging, but it wouldn’t show on the main maps. Culverts (a stream that goes through a pipe) do get mapped, whether that’s 2 metres under a path or longer and trickier to map. Remember to think about your source, although if you know where stuff is then local knowledge is fine. If you have plans made by a survey company or contractor they may retain reuse copyright - i.e. the plans can be used for your purposes but you don’t have the right to let OpenStreetMap use the data.
A quick glance (I didn’t check aerial imagery, and don’t know the area) and your recent areas look good. I think you understand the mapping.
Where there are telecoms masts at the side of a country road, you’ve also mapped landuse=industrial around them. I’m not sure what others think, but I’m not sure that’s needed or good. I would expect landuse=industrial to have at least one business operating there.
I was going to ask you to connect the streams to the pond, because it’s great to connect waterways together (if you can confirm they do that). But on closer inspection they are drains and a slurry basin, so I presume that means there’s no flow between them.
I’d say landuse=industrial around an electrical substation is fine but around a telecoms mast (or even an electricity pylon) is probably a bit of a stretch.
Welcome to the forum and OSM, and thanks for asking about this! It’s an interesting topic and one which doesn’t come up very often (I think?). Happy to see people getting involved in their local area
Yes, please do map the separate fields as separate areas (or multipolygons if you want, but I think this complicates things).
In particular, it allows for tagging different fields according to their usage. I’m not a farmer, but I do quite a lot of farmland mapping in NW England, and have some tagging guidance which several of us in the area have put together: User:Gurglypipe/landuse - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Here’s an example area which uses pretty much all those field taggings: OpenStreetMap
In terms of trees, I tend to map the obviously-large trees in the hedges as a node on the hedge. Any tree in the middle of a field (which is rare, special, and to be cherished) gets a node in the field. I find that adding the trees after drawing the field and hedge reduces the number of nodes you have to join together to tie everything together.
Yes, I think that’s a nice thing to record and keep in usage. You might want to use loc_name rather than name if you feel the names aren’t more widely known. But I see others have also made sensible suggestions about naming in the replies above already.
I approach this two ways. If the ditch has been fenced off, then I’ll put an area (normally either scrub or wetland) within the fencing, and have the fields start either side of the fencing. If it hasn’t, I’ll normally just draw the ditch inside one of the fields.
However, I am typically mapping pasture land rather than cropland, so the field is legitimately anything that a sheep could reach. A different approach might make more sense for cropland!
I would typically map a drain if it shows up on aerial imagery or on either the OS OpenData or OS OpenMap background layers, as that typically means it’s visible (or signs of it are visible) on the ground.
If you’re thinking just about buried land drains, I wouldn’t map them, and would just map the ditch they connect into. Buried land drains are basically unverifiable.
You probably already know this, but bear in mind the difference between a ditch and a drain in OSM terms. A drain is concrete lined, so for UK farmland you’re probably always going to want to tag things as waterway=ditch (or waterway=stream if it’s natural).
I would map the area around a telecoms tower (or electricity substation) as landuse=service (and the buildings inside the area as building=service similarly).
I don’t think that’s a stretch, to me it’s just wrong. There are parts of the world where just about every house is served by lines on poles, that doesn’t stop it from being residential landuse.
It might make sense along a major route that’s fenced off with dedicated access tracks etc, but even than I’d be wary of it.
If these are drains with frequent enough manholes or vent pipes then I think they’re probably OK, if not then they’re probably a bit too difficult to verify unless they’re e.g. French drains with visible gravel.
I understood ‘land drain’ to mean something like A Land Down Under – The Museum of English Rural Life, not a simple culvert. They really aren’t visible on the surface at all apart from where they outfall or when the clay pipe or slab cover (both of which are buried under the soil/turf) breaks.
I agree that culverts (e.g. where a stream/ditch crosses under a track or building) should be mapped — and they are typically shown on OS OpenData/OpenMap as a gap in the blue line of a watercourse.
Fields names have been added extensively in Wharfedale from historic OS mapping.
I’m not convinced that this is creating a better map, e.g. it’s not clear whether these names still exist, and what has happened with field boundary changes. As suggested loc_name might be a good way to record this local knowledge.
landuse=service is not a documented tag (it only has 400 uses). Individual telecom poles should not have a specific landuse= enclosing them, unless they are in some kind of fenced area, in which case landuse=industrial is the most appropriate.
landuse=service doesn’t have to be documented for people to use it. Perhaps eventually someone will document it based on its usage, that’s fine.
Assuming the situation we’re talking about is something like here, then:
I strongly disagree that landuse=industrial is appropriate for telecom masts. A telecom mast is not part of an industrial process, it’s a piece of service infrastructure. imo if landuse=service is somehow not appropriate, it would be better to leave such an area untagged than tag it as landuse=industrial.
This is a really good thing to do. There are some really big and clumsy famland areas in the UK. I’ve been splitting up some of them to make them more manageable.
This is my current least favourite farmland mapping in the UK: Relation: 9084477 | OpenStreetMap. Many of the relation outers for this area are also outers in other relations, which makes editing, particularly for newer editors challenging.
These are a real plain to split up into individual fields, even with josm and utilsplugin2 (alt+x to split polygons). The easiest way to deal with mega-multipolygons like this would be to delete the multipolygon while retaining the outer way(s), then draw all the fields from scratch making use of the previous geometry with follow mode. If it gets done in multiple changesets and the farmland disappears for a few days, that’s ok. The other way is to delete the relation and change the outer into a closed way tagged landuse=farmland, and use alt+x as above to split into individual fields, but this still means you have to split out and delete any areas that overlap the existing inners.
