US Forest Service Data

This page attempts to document data sources for the US Forest Service Data Import. More information on tagging and status of imports can be found at the following pages:

• National Forest lands status
• National Forest Road System tagging
• Tagging National Forest lands

Data Sources

All National Forests and Grasslands have GIS data and prepared map products available for download, usually limited to the extent of the Forest and/or Grassland. A statement from region 6 (Pacific NW) http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/data-library/gis/disclaimers.shtml says that the data are public domain. There are some files very relevant to OSM (trails; recreation points listing campsites, docks etc) and some not so useful to the normal OSM reader (owl and fish habitats).

Tagging

See main article - United States/Public lands/Forest Service

Priorities

A way to characterize a prioritized list of things to do in OSM for National Forests might be the following:

1. Boundary data should be accurate and recent.
2. Wilderness inholding data (if any) should be accurate and recent.
3. Other (private) inholdings should be accurate and recent.
4. NFs which are substantially or largely forested might realistically be set to landuse=forest. This is a good first step but it vastly preferable to map forest separately as it is a separate object.
5. NFs which are not substantially or largely forested can have a landuse (or landcover, if it better emerges and/or is better supported in renderers) tag added to subset areas which accurately depict landuse within those subset areas.
6. Trails, campgrounds, POIs, etc. should be updated to be accurate and recent.

Hierarchy tree using super-relations

All National Forests should be constructed as relations. For a given National Forest, consider creating a super-relation, relation:boundary, to collect individual boundary relations for ranger districts (assign role=subarea). This allows including an "admin_centre" node for ranger district and forest headquarters office locations. This hierarchy-tree approach and examples for super-relations are included in the Super-relation/Implementation wiki page. This may assist in resolving rendering errors by reducing the members for each relation, which is recommended to be limited to 300 for better performance. Relation size may become excessive when substituting ownership extent for the proclaimed administrative forest boundary, see August 2020 Talk-US mailing list discussion. Prospective subarea relations may correspond to ranger district boundaries, or further subareas if member count is still excessive. Since National Forests do not have jurisdiction (other than perhaps emergency wildfire response) within the administrative forest boundary, it's believed for best user experiences to limit depiction of national forest extents as ownership (see mailing list discussion). Further division below the ranger district level may allow creating subarea relations that encompass management areas, such as Congressionally-designated wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, or forest plan allocated areas for managed forest (landuse=forest, or higher protection levels protect_class=* such as primitive areas, natural areas, or research areas such as experimental forests.

A proposed full hierarchy to represent the depiction of the National Forest System in OpenStreetMap:

• National Forest System
  • Region
    • National Forest and/or National Grassland
      • Ranger District
        • Management Area - this is the division of the National Forest into areas with specific management objectives and use restrictions. Existing spatial data may/may not respect the administrative boundaries of ranger districts. Tagging will vary this level for protection level (e.g. higher for wilderness areas).
          • Forest Compartment - The potential exists for creating a relation of collected stand-level ways for Tag:boundary=forest_compartment. Potential US Forest Service Data import source is the Field-Sampled Vegetation (FSVeg) "location" data layer soon to be included in the Enterprise Data Warehouse. For the US Forest Service, compartments are a division of the administrative ranger district boundary and includes both private and public land ownership and do not respect management area boundaries. As a result, the "location" layer is likely a poor choice of a direct import source into OpenStreetMap.
            • Forest Stand - tag with some variation of natural=*, e.g. natural=wood, natural=scrub, natural=grassland, natural=wetland, natural=water. Potential US Forest Service Data import source is the Field-Sampled Vegetation (FSVeg) "setting" data layer soon to be included in the Enterprise Data Warehouse. These data layers may include more attribute values for populating leaf_type=*, wetland=*, plant_community=*. Combining settings with the same "location" value and Forest Service-ownership value may be a way to arrive at a suitable relation for Tag:boundary=forest_compartment, unless it is of interest to include ways describing private ownership within the Forest Service administrative boundary.

Regions

This map shows the regions the US Forest Service is divided into and the regional office contact information.

National Forest and National Grassland Boundaries

National Forests and Grasslands Proclamation Boundaries are not the same as NF land. In many National Forests and Grasslands, some or most of the land inside the proclamation boundary is not owned by the USFS.

At a basic level, National Forests and Grasslands could be mapped as the proclamation boundaries, but this is more of an administrative boundary rather than a protected area. Within the proclamation boundary, additional lands can be acquired through purchase or accepted as a donation from a partnering organization. Existing Forest Service lands may also be conveyed to non-federal ownership, either in exchange for other lands or outright sale or transfer as surplus lands (Public Law 97-465,"Small Tracts Act" (16 U.S.C. 521c-521i).

Given the sometimes transient nature of federally-owned land managed by the US Forest Service, its best to include in OpenStreetMap only those ownership parcels managed by the US Forest Service to describe extent of National Forests and Grasslands. Datasets titled "Basic Surface Ownership Parcels" include all parcels within the proclamation boundaries (the basic dataset is merged and easier to deal with rather than the detailed ownership datasets). Only use the polygons that are tagged as owned by USFS, not Non-FS.

Management Areas

National Forests are required by the National Forest Management Act of 1976 to prepare land and resource management plans that allocate areas within the Forest Service-managed lands based on their suitability for various uses in compliance with other laws and regulation. Management areas often include Congressionally designated wilderness, areas included in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, Roadless Areas, and other areas for the primary objective of timber, wildlife, recreation, water quality protection or for research purposes. See Land Management Planning Unit Metadata for scheduled updates to Forest Plans. See Other National Designated Area metadata. Individual National Forests and Grasslands encompass all the above designations in their Land and Resource Management Plans, but data at the national extent is not available through the Enterprise Data Warehouse or Geospatial Data Discovery Portal. Contiguous spatial data may be available on individual Region or Forest websites, likely listed under Maps and GIS data or Planning. As sources are located, they will be listed below.

• Region
  • Forest - (link to Forest Plan Management Area GIS data)

Forest Service Transportation System

The Forest Service Engineering program maintains a database of roads and trails called INFRA. Individual roads and trails are inventoried, monitored for condition, and planning is conducted prior to making changes that affect the transportation system. Travel Planning is the process that implements the 2005 Travel Management Rule (36 CFR part 212), and results in the periodic publication of standard Motor Vehicle Use Maps (MVUM) for each National Forest and Grassland. Off-highway vehicle, over-snow vehicle and non-motorized trails are primarily managed under the Forest Service Recreation program.

Forest Service Facilities

Visitor information center locations, campgrounds, day use areas, trail-heads, dispersed campsites, and other developed recreation sites are valuable data for inclusion in OpenStreetMap. Many of these features are included on the Motor Vehicle Use Maps, the Primary Base Series maps otherwise known as FSTopo, and on the Secondary Base Series maps otherwise know as Forest Vistor maps.

See also

• US National Park Service Data
• United_States/Public_lands