I have been tracking down some properties owned and managed by the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Michigan Technological Univeristy. These include university properties managed as farms, forests, nature reserves, and field-based teaching. Many are open to the public, so this allows greater access to recreational opportunities by having these added and available in OSM.

Other efforts have been to map properties owned by the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts that are open to the public. County Forests, parks, and other local owned public properties are important in my view as well. The MapRoulette challenge for Michigan GNIS nodes by user BBMiller has been a useful tool to focus on those features, particularly the emphasis on adding the GNIS:feature_id identifier which will assist with Wikidata and Wikipedia integration.

I was inspired to create my own MapRoulette Challenge for Michigan GNIS stream and canal points to add the GNIS identifer where missing, as well as build in potential for future automated editingn tools to improve connectivity to wikidata, and just plain add in named rivers, streams, and drains that are missing from OSM, incomplete, or need their ways to be collected into relations.

Upcoming, i am thinking of making another MapRoulette challenge for the midpoints of roads on the Ottawa National Forest- most of those seem to be missing so that would be an opportunity to focus on digitizing and adding those in a high quality level from USGS 3DEP/aerial imagery rather than directly importing.

Just been a lot of fun working on Michigan things and figuring out some routes to improve OSM. See you in the changesets!

Still trucking along on the state Forest re—import. Thanks to my partner mappers reviewing for errors, tags and such.

Traverse City Forest Management Unit is re-uploaded. Baraga and Crystal Falls are done. Gwinn still needs attention to migrate ways from the Escanaba River State Forest relation, to become a super-relation. MDNR offices need added with tagging of amenity=ranger_station ad admin_centers roles in those relations. I figured out I could drop the address node in the building and tag that with the amenity for the fun little ranger station symbol to show.

Commercial Forest lands- I learned I was using an older data set. Plum Creek Timberlands has since been bought off Weyerhaeuser by Lyme Timber Company to form Lyme Great Lakes Timberlands. They also have a separate Lyme Timber Realty company for which some lands are enrolled, but I am putting all of it under Lyme Great Lakes, one relation. They also bought holdings from Heartwood-GMO. And TRG is another player now too, seems to have bought the holdings from The Forestland Group?

In the updated 2021 commercial Forest data from MDNR, there also are holdings of The Nature Conservancy for the Slate River Forest and Two-Heart River Forest Reserve. Of course i jumped at that opportunity and imported that straightaway. I dumped in the commercial Forest data into qgis, dissolved by owner name, split by type, then split those by owner name, so now I have separate GEOJSON layers that should speed up import by quite a bit.

I loaded the Plum Creek Timberlands, LP - commercial Forest relation, but I am struggling with tagging, something the Mapnik renderer will accept and recognize. From my reading of the wiki the boundary=Forest seems to have been the compromise to mapping recognizable Forest ownerships that might not fit in boundary=protected_area, leisure=nature_reserve. I gather the idea with the boundary=forest tag allows one to continue mapping natural=water, =wood, =wetland or land use=forest within the boundary. If I could find a conservation easement documented I would change to boundary=Protected_area, the more common tag. But the Mapnik renderer doesn’t recognize the boundary=Forest tag (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/AreasTab) making it tempting to add or change to land use=forest and just excluding natural=*, water areas etc.

Anywho I added all the other tags I could come up with. This commercial Forest data came from the MDNR but for at least the large ownerships doesn’t seem all that up to date, it included some MDNR parcels probably recently acquired. Maybe the larger ownerships are too complex and small changes are hard for the MDNR to stay on top of since they rely on a legal description in the commercial Forest application process. The MDNR comm. Forest data includes owner, so in QGIS I pulled out the corporate owners and dissolved by owner for their holdings, figuring those might get imported first since they are biggest and most likely to remain in the program longer. Since they are adjacent, I got back into fixing up the Escanaba River State Forest and Copper Country State Forest units- I created one for Baraga, Crystal Falls for Copper Country and the Gwinn unit for Escanaba. I did some fixing while ways were in the Escanaba main relation, but got a glitch and it dumped them all out of that, so I went ahead and created a relation for Gwinn rather than reload them all back in to Escanaba. Wheh!

Relation for plum creek timberland LP, acquired by Weyerhaeuser in 2016?- https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/14051942

Back to the Lower Penin., Cadillac unit of the PM is all importers and is rendering, TC unit is rendering but not fully imported, about 3/4 of the way there.

I also deviated to Isle Royale NP and replaced geometry for some trails and added some trails after fooling in OHM fixing the Apostle islands and Isle Royale archipelago in Lake Superior (thanks Richard W. For the motivation).

Here is my attempt at mapping additional commercial forest lands in Michigan that are open to public access for hunting, trapping and fishing- starting with a relation for a blob of Plum Creek Timberlands, L.P., operating subisidary of Weyerhaueser: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/14051942

I am uncertain about the best course of tagging - these do not fit the boundary=protected_area, or leisure=nature_reserve tags for public lands. Maybe boundary=forest (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dforest). Currently tagged with landuse=forestry per- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landuse%3Dforestry

It appears with the approved new tagging scheme of boundary=forest, areas within would be mapped landuse=forest (plantations, managed forest), and natural=wood (unmanaged wood), natural=water, natural=wetland, eg.)

Anyone care to weigh in?

I finished up with Seney NWR, putting it on the right side of the Creighton Truck Road and the state forest on the other. Pictured Rocks- I pulled the ownership tracts from the NPS open data portal, loaded into QGIS, extracted those tracts with “Status”=”FED”, dissolved those and ended up with only a handful of ways. Those went into OSM, subarea within the main relation, tagged boundary=protected_area, ownership=national. The designated National lakeshore boundary I kept but with boundary=national_park (sure why not), similar to what was done with the administrative boundary of the Manistee National Forest (which is still a throwing JOSM validator error for missing admin_level). That’s the park boundary, but not the protected area boundary since the NPS only has jurisdiction over the federal land holdings. Just like the USFS, drop an entrance sign along the road to indicate you are entering the designated lakeshore/forest, but not the ownership/protected area just yet necessarily. Anyhow, mapping the actual ownership separately enabled me to match up the Shingleton unit state forest holdings with the federal ownership, resolving the overlap issue. The Shingleton unit has been getting a total rework too that has taken some careful checking since lots of phony parcels that were previously loaded that are incorrect, not reflecting the current state ownership.

As far as the private timber lands with NPS conservation easements, that may take a little head-scratching to resolve if worth mapping or not. Already someone created a precedent of inputting a few DNR-enrolled private commercial forest lands into OSM with tags landuse=forest, description “Commercial Forest land”. Now if we did the same state-wide, that would sure add a lot of stuff, especially in the UP. Maybe after the state & national forests are resolved.

Cadillac unit is all re-imported: https://osm.org/relation/14031776; working on Traverse City unit now: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/14043348. Getting there slowly.

Its been crazy trying to edge match to natural water features, adjacent DNR and USFS properties, so I appreciate any help with the alignment problems after public land boundaries have been imported.

I started on the Cadillac FMU of the Pere Marquette- https://osm.org/relation/14031776

The Cadillac unit involved lots more crazy edge matching with the Gladwin Unit and Manistee NF units. I also started on the Kirtland’s Warbler Management Area (US Fish & Wildlife Service ownership), https://osm.org/relation/14032242, mostly nested within the Gladwin Unit and others. The Seney also has been mangled as I worked to resolve countless shared nodes with a road, so it will need a fresh import from the USFWS open data portal (https://gis-fws.opendata.arcgis.com/) and a relation created as well for the whitefish point area included in the national wildlife refuge.

Interesting to see someone put in Commercial Forest lands, MDNR property tax program enrollment that enables access for hunting and fishing. I am included to do a mass tagging of those already imported with an owner=private, access=permissive, hunting=yes tags. General access is not allowed, only hunting/fishing/trapping access.

As always, I am documenting status at: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Michigan/Parks

I am really glad Cad-Man are rendering- WC still seems to have a problem. I did have it as administrative boundary for a bit with the admin_level tag, but I think the admin_level tag was throwing me off- that tag seems to be specific in the US for certain values (=6), regions(=5), etc. Scrubbing the admin_level tag seems to help.

There are still a few national forests kicking around with the boundary=national_park tag to clean up, and there are probably national parks mapped as such that have private inholdings within them not depicted- only the outer boundary is mapped. Case in point, though not a national park, is Adirondack Park- https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1695394. Adirondack Park is a stretch since there is no national designation for that, unlike National Forests and National Parks. I agree the green line render is a bit much if we used the boundary=national_park tag, and the consensus from the mailing lists seems to be a strict literal interpretation of national “park”, if anything to keep people getting confused- best to stay conservative with the interpretation.

I also made some progress on the Mackinaw State Forest - Gaylord Unit late yesterday and should be done with that one. Then back to fix up the Lake Superior State Forest units. The fix for Tahquamenon Falls State Park seems to be rendering when zoomed in. The Newberry Unit is rendering also- https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/13993909. Shingleton and Sault Ste. Marie still seem to have problems. I would have liked to move on to the Pere Marquette but a little detour to the UP was a nice change.

When I was a kid, my dad relied on an over-sized atlas depicting roads, towns, public lands, lakes and streams at the county level. He used this on road-trips, consulting it while exploring to determine if uncertain just which way to go. Signs were important- the signs marking the corners of state game areas. Road signs. County boundary signs. They were a navigational aid. When I got old enough, he gave me my own atlas. By that time however, the internet provided a bevy of informational maps at much smaller scale- letter-size maps showing individual public lands, trail maps, and much more. Updated and more accurate than the old atlas often based on commercial data sources and the 24,000-scale series of USGS topographic quadrangle maps. Today, we can make our own paper maps using online mapping applications, consult a digital map on a cellular-connected smartphone pocket computer or wristband computer, create our own spatial data using high-accuracy GNSS or heads-up digitizing from remotely sensed products, or even contribute to the public world-wide map of OpenStreetMap. There are so many options in this new digital environment to explore and find uses for. It’s wonderful today when we still have our over-sized paper atlas or folded maps available at any outdoors store, but also so many more options to access, create, and share maps. So whether you have a paper map in your pocket, or a mobile remote connection to the world-wide digital map, or a window onto the world from your home computer, I hope you find great experiences exploring and learning more about the world.

The ways representing the Manistee and Cadillac ranger districts now are split out into separate relations. For the Manistee National Forest super-relation, I added a way to represent the administrative Forest boundary, snapped to the adjacent outer edges of the ownership ways. This gives some geometry for the relation when you search for and pull it up. To avoid confusion over actual ownership/extent of protected_area / leisure=nature_preserve, I scrubbed those from the Manistee relation and they are only on the district subarea relations. Manistee is tagged boundary=administrative, the subareas tagged boundary=protected_area. We will see how the tagging savants respond to this strategy. I did add an admin_level=6, the equivalent of the county level, to help show the Manistee admin boundary at a wide zoom level. Maybe it will work. I thought about adding a government=forestry tag as well to show that it’s not a civil\municipal admin boundary, but didn’t add it:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/11565336

Splitting Cadillac and Manistee resulted in some simpler geometry. Previously the ownership extent protruded out into Hodenpyl dam pond, so I brought that back to the shoreline (snapped to edge of natural=water). Still need to add an admin_centre node for the Cad-Man office in Manistee and the Forest HQ in Cadillac.

In other news I added in the 5000-acre Dunbar experimental forest in the eastern UP, it’s a MSU property, I tagged it with the university as the operator and leisure=nature_reserve. I saw a Notre Dame school Forest somewhere in the W UP already in OSM and I know UofM and MTU have school forests too. And there are county forests too- Marquette has a big one near the old Air Force base. I Still need to get back in and finish up the Mackinac State Forest, Lake Superior State Forest, start on the Pere Marquette. And sometime or another see what’s wrong with the Ottawa NF. Gotta fill in the northern lower and UP!

Andy