As you may be aware, mapping of areas of trees in OSM is complicated. It’s not possible to tell just by looking at the data which of the four(!) approaches described on that page someone is using “natural=wood” and/or “landuse=forest” to mean. It therefore didn’t make a lot of sense to me to display them differently on a map created from OSM data.

Last year there was a proposal to record “leaf_type” and “leaf_cycle” separately, which makes sense (though the wider range of non-European tree types doesn’t seem to be catered for as well as previously. Unfortunately a previous version of that page suggested that “wood=deciduous” should be replaced by “leaf_type=broadleaved”, and a no doubt well-meaning non-local mapper decided to change some areas of mainly deciduous woodland to “leaf_type”. Whilst some of these were correct, clearly there are some issues with this, but as I was changing some that I did have local knowledge of, the thing that mainly struck me was that the situation on the ground was far more complicated than previously mapped, or rendered, on OpenStreetMap. I therefore decided to start trying to record “leaf_type” and (when there was enough data, render it. Initial results can be seen here: That location corresponds to here in OSM. There’s a lot more to do there, but at least there’s a bit more detail than “a large area of trees”.

That rendering is created by a combination of this lua script at osm2pgsql data import time and this stylesheet. It’s primarily designed for showing England-and-Wales-specific rights of way, but trees seemed like a natural extension.