It’s long been a goal of mine to fill in landuse and landcover information for the Columbus area. In previous efforts, I found myself spending a lot of time tracing around the edges of a large connected area of farmland, or woods, or residential development, and then when I finished that one multipolygon, I was too burnt out to do much more, so other landuses were done with less detail or left undone.

I’ve now solved that problem, by creating a work grid. This is essentially just an OSM data file that I load as a separate layer under my working data layer in JOSM, and I never upload the grid layer to the server because it doesn’t correspond to any real objects. You can download the Columbus work grid if you like; it has upload=”false” set in the XML so JOSM won’t treat it as data that should be uploaded.

By focusing on one square-mile section at a time, I can map out landuse to my desired level of quality and detail. Now the remaining problem is that I only get around to mapping one or two grid squares each week, and there are 900 sections in the grid!