OpenStreetMap
NFSR - Siuslaw National Forest
Napísal caseywittmier 18 Júl 2025 v jazyku English. Naposled upravené 21 Júl 2025.July 20, 2025 - After 17 months, I have reviewed every road in the NFSR network for the Siuslaw National Forest. Below is a summary of what was involved and the process I used.
Foundational elements
The foundational elements of this project are two public domain road datasets, the NFSR data from the United States Forest Service, and the OR-Trans dataset from the state of Oregon. NFSR is the reference for road numbers, names given to roads by the USFS, road surfaces, and geometry to a certain degree. The OR-Trans data is a reference for primary road names, geometry verification, and the tag formatting of USFS roads. I was able to use additional GIS from counties to verify geometries and primary road names.
Project management
QGIS was utilized as a way to manage the entire project. I used conditional styles on manually added attributes to break the 1,977 roads from the NFSR data into workable chunks, and to keep track of what I had done. Those workable chunks were exported as KMLs to use as a reference when working in iD.
Edits on OSM
I elected to use iD for this project to force myself to manually review everything I was doing, and to remove the possibility of an accusation of a careless import.
The NFSR data contains good geometry for the most part, but there are quite a few errors that are very significant. The NFSR data also contains several discrepancies from reality, such as roads being marked as closed and not open for use, despite the roads not being gated and definitely being actively used. Blanket replacing the geometry and tags in OSM without manual review would worsen the quality of OSM data.
This was also a good opportunity to do some TIGER cleanup and resolve road/water crossing issues. Unfortunately, with the nature of the crossing issues, resolving one can lead to getting flags for multiple others along the road or waterway, which can make it appear that you are creating these issues even though they were already present.