To whomever is reading this, my apologies.

I work for my state’s Dept. of Wildlife Conservation, and help make maps of agency-managed lands for public use. I’ve noticed a few projects geared towards community-development of basemaps.
At a recent Division-wide meeting, one of the Field Biologists brought up that they were surprised to find one of the WMAs (Wildlife Management Areas) depicted in an online vector basemap. At which point, I decided that I needed to take it upon myself to add/update our areas in those community-driven basemap projects.

I began by using the osm.org basic iD Editor. I was surprised to learn that shapes could not be imported directly. But happily began playing “connect the dots” with gpx files rendered from my shapefiles’ vertices.

We use Esri tools, so I made use of Dan Patterson’s “Poly* features to points” tool to create numbered points for each WMA.

This was okay for the first week.

I found myself losing patience with all those dots… Why couldn’t I trace another editor’s lake boundary? Why are this area’s boundaries linked to the roads? Why is this one area treated as two… is it not possible to dissolve them into one area along the shared boundary?

I don’t want to anger the rest of the OSM Community, but nor do I want to spend the rest of the month connecting the dots over some million-and-a-half acres and fiddly boundaries along man-made reservoirs.

So I found JOSM. It is horrendibly confusing to me, but I hope to get it right. …I note there is a ‘trace other feature’ tool. ^_^

Besides simply adding WMAs that are not currently shown by OSM, I’d like to update/correct outdated boundaries, and especially merge those areas that do not depict what is supposed to be shown: A Single WMA may contain one or more “Special Use Areas.” As of right now, other editors have added each of these areas as its own WMA. That needs changing. Also, I’ve browsed the tags, but it seems the most appropriate would be “area=Park” with the addition of “boundary_type=protected_area.” They aren’t wilderness preserves or reserves for the protection of some designated refugia, but lands managed for the conservation of wildlife and to be accessed by the public so long as they have purchased a valid state hunting license, fishing license, or conservation passport.