Distinct rendering of landuse=forest + plantation=yes

[luk-brue]

Introduction

There are big areas in the world which are covered with a fast growing cash crops like eucalyptus trees, which are used for lumber. These are planted and harvested with heavy machinery and usually, there is no selective logging, but the whole area gets razed and replanted. The heavy machinery demands terracing of hills to operate there. The result are some greatly altered landscapes which look like this every ten years:

Currently used tags

landuse=forest + plantation=yes is the official way to tag a typical plantation forest. landuse=plantation was deprecated, and landuse=plant_nursery is inaccurate - the product of these plantations is lumber, and not young plants.

Expected behavior

I would expect the landuse=forest + plantation=yes areas to be rendered in a way that distinguishes them from a normal forest with selective logging. For the difference, we could use another texture maybe, that has a plantation feel (something like the plant nursery texture), or use some less fresh green, or just not put the classic forest symbols all over the area, which are very misleading.

Actual behavior

It is rendered like a normal forest in friendly and inviting green with little tree icons in it. see the area on openstreetmap here The forest there is tagged with the plantation tags. As an average hiker, I would tend to think, this is a nice place to go. It looks like this on the map: What I would encounter instead looks like this on Bing:

Relevance

There are currenty roughly 2300 occurences of the plantation=yes tagging scheme worldwide (tagfinder). But, for example in South Portugal, there are vast landscapes not mapped yet, which are mainly plantations. I have by no means the experience to judge wether adapting the carto style is necessary in this case, but I wanted to present my ideas in case it is interesting to somebody.

[imagico]

Thanks for the suggestion.

plantation=yes is an undocumented tag with low use, concentrated in very few local areas (1.8k of the 2.4k uses are in around three local areas in Australia)

The tag has unclear meaning in large parts of the world where most of the woodland has been planted at some point. So it seems to add just yet another poorly defined variant to the spectrum of woodland tagging ideas.

I would be very much in favor of adding more differentiation to woodland rendering. But it should be based on locally verifiable differentiations that can be reliably determined by mappers all over the world. leaf_cycle obviously comes to mind here - with meanwhile more than 1 million uses on natural=wood/landuse=forest.

[SK53]

@luk-brue @imagico : I'd have to look at other usage for plantation=yes, but I think this post I wrote a while back is still relevant. In my context; plantation=yes does not just mean a planted woodland, but one planted in rows (see 4 criteria I suggest at the end).

I always envisaged that a simple way of showing the distinction between a plantation and other forest/woodland would be for the symbols to be oriented in a grid instead of using the pseudorandom pattern. At some time in the past I noticed that this is exactly what the Ordnance Survey does on its 1:50k mapping (as most coniferous woodland in the UK are in plantations). The effect is very subtle, but there nonetheless.

Note that plantation=yes does not just mean large forestry plantations of the type illustrated. Additional tags would probably be needed to separate these out, but indication of species would generally be useful. I can't see OSM Carto being able to resolve such information, although a dedicated hiking map may do so (note that Orienteering maps do show differences in the field layer of woodland, but I'm not sure how OpenOrienteeringMap does this.)

[imagico]

@SK53 - yes, if we had tags that would classify woodlands based on such locally well verifiable criteria like you list in your blog post that would be something we could consider to highlight with a pattern variation. I would however caution against trying to tag that in an aggregate form combining several different criteria in a single tag because this is likely to not work too well in the global variety of settings we have. Note that for crop producing trees consensus currently is to use landuse=orchard with the appropriate subtag (trees) - where we could consider varying the pattern based on type as well.