OpenStreetMap
There is a well-established definition for tagging National Parks in OpenStreetMap.
Hooge Veluwe National Park Image credit: Wikipedia
The definition,
A national park is a relatively large area of land declared by a government (just as
boundary=administrativeare declared/recognised by governments), to be set aside for human recreation and enjoyment, animal and environmental protection
would also apply to the many State Parks in the United States, and perhaps provincial and state parks in other countries as well. However, the boundary=national_park page does not give any specific guidance. I am about to map some state parks in my home state Utah, and I will tag them with boundary=national_park for now because they fit the definition.
How do you map state or provincial parks in your area?
Discussion
Comment from 4rch on 23 August 2014 at 22:38
I don’t know the laws in the US but state parks seem to be something different than national parks.
In Germany and many other countries boundary=national_park is only used for national parks which have IUCN Category II.
You could check the IUCN Category for each park here: http://www.protectedplanet.net/
For other protected areas there exist different tags: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure%3Dnature_reserve http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dprotected_area
IUCN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUCN_Protected_Area_Management_Categories
Comment from mvexel on 23 August 2014 at 23:18
I agree they are different but they fit the definition on the wiki page.
I added a link to the IUCN categories wiki page to the
boundary=national_parkwiki and a discussion topic there as well.Comment from 4rch on 23 August 2014 at 23:53
Yes, you’re right. But in my opinion the definition of boundary=national_park is very vague though.
State parks seem to have different IUCN levels so they aren’t even comparable among themselves.
Personally i like the approach of boundary=protected_area as it could deal with many special cases in different countries. e.g. due to the usage of protection_title= Unfortunately it isn’t rendered yet: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/603
No matter what key you choose, I’d propose to add “protect_class” and “protection_title=state park”.
Comment from mvexel on 24 August 2014 at 03:56
I agree that it’s better to have a generic
boundary=protected_areaor something with a specifier tag added to it. Isprotect_classalready documented / used?Comment from Alan Trick on 25 August 2014 at 15:48
I haven’t been involved in any of the tagging, but I can tell you how these happen to be tagged (at least in some cases) in Western Canada and the US.
US
Canada
Note that parks in Canada are protected (at least till someone with enough money convinces the government to move the borders), it’s just the tags that are missing.
Comment from Sanderd17 on 26 August 2014 at 15:52
leisure=park is completely different IMO. It’s normally a man-made area where certain flowers are planted, paths made etc.
You could use leisure=nature_reserve for those smaller parks. Though boundary=protected_area seems to be the newer choice.
Comment from skorasaurus on 2 September 2014 at 17:52
The Cleveland OSM community has thought a bit about this because there’s an Cleveland and the region has a large parks system, The Cleveland Metroparks. In addition to operating the zoo, they maintain ‘reservations’ that are used for an extremely wide variety of activities: some are areas that are mostly forest, have a few nature trails which are unpaved and activities besides walking through them are prohibited. Others allow people to have picnics with charcoal BBQs next to several baseball diamonds; others have golf courses; Some of these have all of these features in the same ‘reservation’!
We tentatively agreed to use leisure=nature_reserve although I am not sure if it’s the most appropriate tag to use.
Comment from Sebastien R on 7 August 2015 at 23:46
On a related note, some state parks in the US have sub-areas which are closed to the public. What is the proper way to map these “closed area” features? Adding a gate with access restrictions does not help, especially when zooming out with large closed areas.