OpenStreetMap
I’ve been contributing heavily to the #MapLesotho project for a while, and we’re making great progress on all the basic geometry of the country, like roads, paths, buildings, waterways. A good OSM map of a place has more than that, it has things like POI and amenities, which are hard for an armchair mapper like me to help with. One thing I can do, however, is protected areas. Lesotho is a small country with only a few protected areas, two small “national parks” and some even smaller places. There was no vector source for any of them (neither open nor closed), but by doing a bunch of online research and detective work, and reading wikipedia, I was able to add the two largest:
- Sehlabathebe National Park relation ( and on wikipedia )
- Ts’ehlanyane National Park relation ( and on wikipedia )
Discussion
Comment from Omnific on 8 May 2016 at 17:16
Nice job, I’m sure that wasn’t easy.
Comment from zanadu on 9 May 2016 at 03:50
Impressive
Comment from DeBigC on 9 May 2016 at 06:30
There is a very different land holding system in the Kingdom to what we are used to (Anglo Saxon influences). Basically all land is held by the King, his trustees being Government where there is no settlement and Chieftains in villages. Protection of the environment is sadly not on the radar for either party. Creating reserves is a bi-product of that. That is why phase two of #MapLesotho will need a big focus on forestry and woodlands. Let’s debate the details… how to trace and how to tag.. At a later stage. For the moment let’s record the hinterlands as accurately as possible so that we can un paralyse Government and the Ministry for Forestry and Land reclamation in seeing the conserving role they can have.