OpenStreetMap
Back in early 2010 somebody added a patch of woodland on the eastern end of Hyde Park, clearly representing an area of tree coverage they could see in yahoo imagery (way 52995836 if you're interested). They only mapped tree coverage at the very Eastern end of the park. To me this seemed a bit messy, in the same way that patchy building coverage seems messy. (It was also done initially with a silly tag, but that's another issue) Perhaps this is an example of excessive detail causing problems. One solution I was very tempted by, was to just delete it.
But, I thought, all it would take is for somebody to sit down for a hour and trace the rest of the trees in the same way, and we would have a consistent level of detail across Hyde park. Well today I'm just noticing that someone has done it! It took over a year, but someone's done it:
Thanks user eAi. Hyde Park (map) is now more leafy and tree covered, with a mixture of wood areas and individual trees, and most importantly, the whole of the park has been treated reasonably consistently, making the map quite attractive and useable.
Hyde park is actaully remarkably big. I've lost count of the number of times friends have arranged to meet "in Hyde Park" for a pic-nic or football session, only to discover that they can't find eachother without repeated phone calls "We're between some patches of trees". Must remember to email a link to a map next time... and which map should we use? Definately OpenStreetMap now!
Discussion
Comment from Rovastar on 28 September 2011 at 20:57
It noticed this a few weeks ago, Yeah looks good, top job there. I was going to start doing Hyde Park for some time as I have completed a few parks now elsewhere in the country and London parks look so barren often but never got around to it....I have always liked Regents Park...maybe that one then.
Comment from Terrarium on 29 September 2011 at 12:15
Wow this looks really nice.
We've got the same "problem" in some of Munich's park. I'll try to add some of the tree details too.
Comment from eAi on 30 September 2011 at 12:49
Hey I'm glad people appreciates it!
I spent the best part of a day working on it - it always bothered me how bland the London parks look, so I think what there's now is a big improvement.
That said, it wasn't easy to do. If you don't know them, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens do not generally have what I'd call 'woods' for the most part - the trees are fairly sparsely spaces in many areas. Even so, I've marked these as woods - I basically went from the aerial photos - if they looked fairly solid foliage from the air then I assumed they'd feel rather contained from the ground. At some point I'll pop down there and check on the ground for consistency.
The strong shadows on the trees were a mixed blessing - they make seeing the western edge of the woods hard, but they make seeing small individual trees easy!
There's also some areas that are full of small new trees (sound of the round pond), which I marked as wood. This was partly due to lazyness - I didn't want to mark every tree. Also, the intention there is clearly to create a wood, and given a few years I guess it will be one.
Anyway, glad it's appreciated - there's certainly a lot more trees that can be marked in London - both in the parks and in the streets. It's this kind of detail that raises OSM above the other maps available.
I was inspired to do this by Dulwich Park in South London, by the way :)
Comment from Tom Chance on 3 October 2011 at 11:01
Glad to have been an inspiration! I've tried to make parks in my patch of Southwark really beautiful, consistent and useful for park fans like myself. It would be great to get more parks looking like this.