Important note: The imagery I use as an example below is different in source from the imagery used for the MapRoulette imagery. The example below shows imagery that was commissioned by Texas itself, and is available in the public domain. The imagery in the MapRoulette challenge is licensed from Google by Texas and made available to MapRoulette specifically. So I can’t say positively that it’s OK to add this imagery to JOSM or iD, and removed specific instructions to do so.

Have you tried the Texas Cemetery challenge in MapRoulette? If you have not heard about it yet, I posted about it on my diary a few weeks ago. The short version: the friendly folks at TxDOT supplied me with a database of their known cemetery locations, we matched them with existing OSM, and if there was no match, we ask you to map it :)

If you tried it, you may have found though that it can be a bit frustrating :( Bing and Mapbox aerial imagery is often just not detailed enough to see if there is a cemetery or not in the location indicated. I discussed this problem with the friendly folks over at TxDOT, who are very excited about getting more data into OSM. They told me about some of the high resolution imagery that is available to the public through TNRIS, the Texas Natural Resources Information System. Here is an example of some of the amazing data they have:

If you compare that with Bing, it means the difference between seeing a vague blur or seeing the presence of a cemetery very clearly! Super exciting stuff. So we set out to create a TMS endpoint that we plugged into MapRoulette. See the difference!

Go give it another try! Thank you and thanks TxDOT!