India/Forests

Forest areas can be traced even from low resolution satellite imagery, and so locating all of the forest areas is possible with the available satellite imagery. The Ecological Restoration Alliance map provides an overview of the various ecoregions across the country.

Tagging

Tag wooded areas with natural=wood, natural=scrub or the appropriate natural=* tag.

If you are sure that the area belongs to a reserved/protected forest or community/village forest, then include an additional landuse=forest tag.

For protected areas like National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries and Reserve Forest boundaries, use boundary=protected_area + protect_class=*. The protect_class=* can be used to distinguish between these different types of protected areas.

Note: Agricultural areas may also look deceptively similar to wooded areas in low res imagery, however if you look closely you can see noisy patterns showing human activity.

NRSC LULC

The National Remote Sensing Center has released the Landuse/Lancover data for India at a scale of 1:1 million into the public domain. The dataset is available as a WMS server which can be loaded into [JOSM]

WMS URL:

http://applications.nrsc.gov.in:8080/cgi-bin/mapserv.exe?map=/ms4w/apps/lulc/Mapfiles/lulc0708_LAN.map&version=1.1.1&service=WMS&request=GetCapabilities&layer=LULC%20of%20India&

Usage instructions: http://www.mail-archive.com/talk-in@openstreetmap.org/msg01449.html

Statistics (As of 12/2022)

Data Source: https://fsi.nic.in/isfr-2021/chapter-13.pdf

References

• Forest Survey of India
• Tiger Reserves - FSI
• [http://www.indiatravelplus.com/wildlife/wildlife-maps-india.html Wildlife maps of India (rough overview)