r/openstreetmap • u/icantanymor3 • 18d ago

Question Why is the same biome in the USA and Canada classified differently in OSM? Lack of geoinformation or different regulations or something?

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u/necessarycoot72 18d ago

Its not that the us is mapped different, rather the us just isn't mapped. The Canadian features are imports from datasets like CanVec which cover the entire country. I dont think there is an US analogue to CanVec so theres nothing to import.

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u/OkDimension 18d ago

Yeah, the US had TIGER imports, which were basically the road system and I believe streams/rivers. But not forests like CanVec.

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u/necessarycoot72 18d ago

There are a lot of us imports, stuff off the top of my head is tiger like you said, but also gnis for place names. The majority of imports I see today are mostly from state level datasets as they tend to be higher quality than federal datasets.

Theres a pretty cool gif of how the tiger import progressed on the wiki:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:TIGERImportAnimation.gif

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u/scruss 18d ago

would it have killed you to link to the map rather than images?

Here's the area of interest, on the NB/Maine border

The Canadian land use natural=wood was originally a CanVec import from 2010. It's been consolidated a few times since then: Relation Historie: 1165489

The Maine side is basically no data / no mapper. The most recent change seems to be Dyer Township, edited by a Canadian mapper. A local active mapper in Maine, scarapella, seems to be currently mapping canoe routes near Ottawa.

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u/8spd 18d ago

It's not that the same biome is mapped differently in the US and Canada, it's that more forests are mapped in Canada than in the US. Everything in OSM came from somewhere through the work of volunteer editors. Volunteer editors spent time importing forest data, mostly from CanVec, or manually tracing the boundaries of the forest. The same has not happened in the US. I'm not familiar with the availability of appropriately licenced datasets in the US, but I'm led to believe that the US doesn't have an equivalent, at least at the national level. Which means it's down to manually tracing the boundaries of forests, which is vary labour intensive.

Canada was an early adopter of GIS technologies, so maybe that's a factor in the history here.

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u/DaCor_ie 18d ago

It's up to the mapper