Background

My girlfriend is embarking on a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail (AT) this year and that started me wondering about how the OpenStreetMap US Community organizes itself around maintaining trail systems. Over the past few years I have been working on the Florida National Scenic Trail, more commonly known as the Florida Trail (FT), starting with the rerouting of the FT through Split Oak Forest WEA, the site of my Masters thesis work.

Status in OSM

I have worked hard to map this park in OSM and have completed the FT through the park and up through Moss Park and Crosby Island Marsh Preserve. The trail is not yet connected to the rest of the FT in Central Florida. The FT is mentioned in two places on the Wiki - under the National Scenic Trail heading of the United States/Long distance trails page and the Florida page. The United Sates/Long distance trails page lists a ten National Scenic Trails, one of which links to the OSM wiki (because I just changed it). and the rest link to their wikipedia pages. The PA - Mid-State Trail also links to its own OSM wiki page which is cool because it even has a progress bar! I asked the OSMUS Slack channel if there’s an organized group or effort maintaining the AT and the answer is no, and @datamongers pointed out that the AT is pretty complete, even being covered by a superrelation.

Proposal

I propose that I start out by creating OSM Wiki pages for each trail (Done - FT, AT) and link to them in the United States/Long distance trails page (done).

Then, check for status and completeness of both the AT and the FT including route, closures, trailheads, and shelters.

Trail segment completeness

1. trail entered and relation created based on remote data (maps, strava, bing)
2. trail wiki page completed and linked to on state wiki, US long distance trails wiki page
3. trailheads entered based on remote data
4. parking entered based on remote data
5. intersecting roads entered based on remote data (if applicable)
6. shelters entered based on remote data (if applicable)
7. intersecting conservation land entered based on remote data
8. intersecting waterways and wetlands entered based on remote data
9. trail, trailheads, parking, shelters, waterways, and wetlands ground-truthed, including trail segment/road names
10. trail protected areas/easements added