Proposal talk:Meadow=wooded meadow

How is this "wooded meadow" significantly different from a savannah? Perhaps landcover=savannah or natural=savannah would be a tagging that is more useful world wide. --N76

Honestly savanna never crossed my mind, I have never heard of anything described as savanna in Northern Europe. Reading the Savanna wiki page it mentions "Savannas are also characterised by seasonal water availability, with the majority of rainfall confined to one season" and “Savannas are subject to regular wildfires and the ecosystem appears to be the result of human use of fire.” nether apply here.

A wooded meadow is not a natural or stable ecosystem, without active agriculture, like harvesting for fodder and/or grazing by livestock, they will revert to woodlands.

I don’t know if it is applicable everywhere perhaps it is limited to Northerly temperate and Boreal regions. But we have several other tags that are limited to some regions.--Dalkvist (talk) 15:21, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi everyone! OSMer from Florida, USA, here. Many of our grasslands that are used for cattle/horse/occasionally other livestock have trees. In bahiagrass pastures the dominant scattered tree is often live oak (Quercus virginiana) and are not removed by ranchers because they provide shade, which is critical during our long, hot summers with frequent thunderstorms. These are just like what @Dalkvist described in that without management they would revert to what locals call "old-field" vegetation, mostly dog fennel, wax myrtle, and blackberry. These are unlike savannahs in that they are only infrequently managed with fire yet they are occasionally irrigated. Florida does have a savannah-like ecosystem with a sparse longleaf pine overstory and a vigorous herbaceous understory that is fire maintained and characterized by seasonal water availability. Sometimes these wooded pastures are managed for timber or fruit production as well as for livestock grazing. This practice is called silvopasture and is actively encouraged by both the University Extension (http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fr139) and the local branch of the Department of Agriculture (https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/Public/FL/FL381.pdf). I would be very pleased to see this tag adopted as I actively manage my leased pasture in silvoculture and know of many pieces of land that could be more accurately tagged if this were to come to pass. Valerietheblonde (talk) 00:43, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Okay, even wikipedia has a definition for "wooded meadow", I guess it is distinct from savannah. But from the photos it sure looks like an ecosystem quite different from a meadow/grassland etc. So why put it as a sub-tag under natural=meadow? Would it be better as a top level tag on its own? e.g. landcover=wooded_meadow or natural=wooded_meadow --N76 (talk) 02:37, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Interesting I didn't know that people were still actively creating them, here in Sweden many are disappearing. Feel free to update the proposal with your information regarding the US usage.

In the natura 2000 hierarchy it falls under the general grassland category. The usage for fodder and/or grazing fits well with how we tag similarly used things (without trees) in osm with meadow. I think there is a parallel to wetland that have both mango groves and bogs as sub-types they are very different. But give mappers and data consumers that don’t care about that level of detail an option just to use the top tag. --Dalkvist (talk) 07:37, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

We have quite a few of them in Südtirol, I stumbled upon this page by looking up how to map them, since a few of them were mapped as landuse=meadow + natural=scrub, which to me sounds like a contradiction. LvdT (talk) 14:30, 20 August 2017 (UTC)