Proposal talk:Landcover Cultivated

Landuse=farmland, landuse=meadow should be used

At OSM we want to map specific features that are real and current and that individual mappers can verify on the ground or with good quality aerial imagery.

Landcover=cultivated does not meet these standards. It's a mix of several different features that already have established tags: landuse=farmland, landuse=meadow, landuse=orchard, landuse=vineyard, and possibly landuse=plant_nursery.

If there is an area of non-forested land in a region of woods, just leave that as a gap in the woodland. It's best to leave an area unmapped if you are not certain what type of landuse or landcover is in that area.

Usually orchards, including palm oil plantations, banana, and coffee plantations in tropical areas, can be distinguished from farmland with row crops and meadows with grass pasture in aerial imagery. But if the imagery isn't good enough, it's best to leave the area untagged and let local mappers add the correct features later.

This was also recommended on the Tagging mailing list. See the discussion: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2019-March/043702.html --Jeisenbe (talk) 04:21, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

General classes have their advantages, especially for remote mapping. For explaining better, I will take example of mapping deforestation in Amazonian rainforest. In the first place, it is very hard to obtain on-site information through citizen science in this case. Luckily for humanity, Amazon is still considered as a wildlife environment, but this means that presence of human is not common there, and also it indicates danger for human beings. For these reasons, we cannot expect many volunteers on-site. On the other hand, if we leave out the possibility of local mapping, the remote mapping remains. However, remote mapping is constrained by the cloud coverage. Namely, rainforests are famous for the frequent cloud coverage (their name is based on this fact in a way), therefore having high-quality and cloud-free imagery might happen extremely rarely. In a case of scarce information, it would be good to omit some constraints related to information acquirement, extending in this way the possibility to map more.

However, if OSM finds general features inconvenient, and prefer to leave the areas unmapped, we will try to follow the guide of the existing tags, and abandon this proposal. We will focus on the use of the landuse=farmland and landuse=orchard plus the key trees=* if we can obtain more information for local expert about what is present in the area, and if we can provide an example of the appearance from satellite of this type of elements. --LorenzoStucchi (talk) and Gorica7 (talk) 9:30, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

"Cultivated" implies tilled cropland

Cultivate: 1. to prepare and work on (land) in order to raise crops; till. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cultivate

- Cultivated implies land that is plowed for seasonal cropland. This would be synonymous with landuse=farmland. I think your intention would be clearer with a tag like landuse=agricultural"?

However, if you can't tell an orchard from farmland or pasture in an aerial image, how can you tell agricultural trees in an orchard from trees planted for forestry, or pasture from marshland? I don't think this tag is much easier to use than the established tags, and it is less specific --Jeisenbe (talk) 04:21, 10 April 2019 (UTC)