Objective

My objective is to represent Dominion Land Survey (DLS) land descriptions in OSM to aid with agricultural accounting and navigation in areas of Western Canada where civic addressing is either not fully implemented or not known. To that end, this entry serves as a draft proposal.

Background

Approximately 800,000 square kilometres of Western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and parts of BC) were subdivided according to the DLS. While many regions have implemented civic addressing (e.g. 12345 Road 321 W) for yard sites, DLS land descriptions (also known as legal descriptions) are still prevalent. Agriculture in particular relies on them to identify fields for crop insurance and on-farm food safety programs.

It it not uncommon for a field to span four land descriptions; I have personally worked with fields that spanned six due to their shape and placement. In the other direction, it is not uncommon for one land description to have multiple properties on it.

My initial focus is on Manitoba but I believe the process I’ve outlined below can be applied to the other Western provinces with minimal changes.

Steps to Implement in Manitoba

1. Import municipal boundaries from MLI (admin_level = 6). The datasource in question is named “Municipalities/Local Govt. Districts”. Cities and towns also show up in this dataset and will need to be filtered out.
2. Clean up shapefiles representing quarter sections, river lots and wood lots so each one is its own entity. They are currently a collection of lines with a centroid label.
3. Import land descriptions into OSM, ensuring a relationship marks them as part of their municipality. I suggest admin_level = 10 to put them on par with neighborhoods in urban areas since these, too, can contain more than one property.

Steps to Implement in Alberta

TBD

Steps to Implement in BC

N.B. admin_level = 8 for municipalities

TBD

Steps to Implement in Saskatchewan

TBD

Closing Thoughts

DLS land descriptions are verifiable administrative boundaries and, for better or for worse, are still used. I believe adding them to OSM would be a great help in rural areas but I lack the skillset to take this project beyond theory. Any and all input, no matter how minor, would be appreciated.