OpenStreetMap
Become sowewhat of an addiction of late. I just cant bear to see huge ares of the map empty without detail. Filling it up with nice green forests is so pleasing to the eyes :)
Doing northeast and central India was on my mind for a long time, i finally managed to do it in a marathon 1 hour tracing session.Tracing the forests themselves is not a big deal, by now my eye can quite easily distinguish the green of forests from agricultural areas in the landsat imagery. The pain is in cutting up the huge areas into smaller polygons so that it loads in pats and not one mega 400km long polygon.
Hopefully i wont have to wait long for my forests to show up in the rerendered low zoom tiles.
Discussion
Comment from Opk on 11 August 2010 at 16:03
I've done quite a bit of mapping tracks that follow the edge of forest where the forest was originally traced from yahoo (and I'm using a GPS). I've often found the forest edge in OSM extends just over the path. I think this is because trees extend out from their base so are bigger on the aerial pictures than you might consider them on the ground. Landsat pictures for your area may not be good enough to pick this up but you might want to keep it in mind.
Comment from PlaneMad on 12 August 2010 at 04:52
true, landsat is extremely low res mapping. obviously not anywhere close to accurate as gps or yahoo, but still it acts as a good base for a start, especially for large scale features like reservoirs and forest areas.