Putting animals on the map | Imagico.de

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OpenStreetMap aims to collect world wide local geographic knowledge and create a map by the people for the people. Practically there is, however, a substantial gap between that lofty ideal and the practical reality of mapping.

A very good example to illustrate this mismatch between the ideal and reality of OpenStreetMap is animal related infrastructure. Animal husbandry is of enormous economic and social importance in huge parts of the world and accounts for a substantial portion of landuse world wide and wild animals and structures they create form a significant part of ecosystems. This is, however, not reflected in practical mapping in OpenStreetMap. Mapping of animal related infrastructure and landuse is quite marginal and most mapping and tagging concepts in that domain are quite shallow semantically compared to other fields of mapping. More than that, mapping of animal related infrastructure is dominated by infrastructure related to pets.

This reflects the massive over-representation of urban populations among mappers in OpenStreetMap. Since animal husbandry and livestock management are primarily pursued in rural areas, many mappers are essentially out of touch with this whole domain.

And this bias is also reflected in maps produced from OpenStreetMap data of course. Even the differentiated depiction of agriculture in general (where mapping is somewhat more widespread and more in depth than for animal husbandry) is rare in OSM based maps while non-pet animal related elements are almost completely absent.

OSM-Carto, as a very rich map that depicts and differentiates a lot of things, currently shows the following features at least partly animal related in a wider sense:

leisure=dog_park – awkwardly with the same base color as playgrounds

landuse=meadow – only shown rudimentarily in the same way as all other grassy landcovers

amenity=veterinary – point symbol and name label, with symbol implying this to be pets related

barrier=cattle_grid/barrier=kissing_gate/barrier=stile – point barrier typically used to block animals but let pedestrians pass through, shown with a point symbol

shop=pet – point symbol and name label

amenity=hunting_stand – point symbol

leisure=bird_hide – point symbol

Retrospect on agricultural landuses

Before i go to discuss new map design concepts i want to take a look back on the extensions of rendering agricultural landuses and animal related infrastructure i had introduced previously. This primarily amounted to differentiating landuse=farmland and landuse=orchard by crop and trees.

landuse=farmland and landuse=orchard differentiated by crop/trees in the AC-Style – link goes to double resolution rendering

In addition i recently introduced rendering of acquacultures:

Rendering of landuse=acquaculture in the AC-Style

Meadow types

The first and most obvious component in depicting elements in the map that are related to animal husbandry is showing land being used for grazing animals and for growing food for animals. There is no general landuse=pasture tag in OpenStreetMap though. And it would make only limited sense since the types of landcover and vegetation used for grazing animals varies a lot world wide. What is well established (due to the focus of mapping in OSM on temperate zone regions) is meadow=pasture as a secondary tag to landuse=meadow for indicating grass covered areas used as lifestock pasture. It is, unfortunately, not common to differentiate the type of animal gazing there. There is, however, a similar tag in the form of meadow=paddock that essentially means pasture for horses. In addition there is meadow=agricultural – which indicates grass being grown for hay production – not necessarily, but practically predominantly for being fed to animals.

New rendering of landuse=meadow + meadow=pasture at different polygon sizes

landuse=meadow + meadow=paddock

landuse=meadow + meadow=agricultural

At large polygons sizes this adds a regular pattern to the grass-green color fill background. But note that at small polygon sizes for meadow=pasture and meadow=paddock i switch to a single symbol pattern (which i first introduced for sport pitches). This reduces the likeliness that at small polygon sizes all symbols are cut off at the edges and are therefore not well readable.

The symbol used for meadow=pasture is showing a generic quadruped animal – the same symbol shape is also used in other designs shown in the following. The symbol used for meadow=paddock depicts a horse.

Meadow orchards

As a not strictly animal related change, but more an extension for agricultural landuse depiction, i also added distinct rendering for meadow orchards. There are two variants of mapping those – either with landuse=meadow and meadow=meadow_orchard or landuse=orchard and orchard=meadow_orchard. For the former the natural design approach is to combine a grass-green base color fill with a tree symbol pattern. For the...