The goal of this import is to add the missing state parks and official State wildlife areas in Colorado. These state wildlife areas often offer free camping if you have a annual fishing, hunting, or rescue permit, which is not expensive. In Colorado, you can get this permit when you register your car. These are good locations for viewing wildlife, fishing, or hunting too. These are often undeveloped, with usually no amenities at all. I’ve been camping at a bunch of these lately, and discovered this data file with a good license.
These boundaries are useful for emergency response, since often in remote areas these are useful staging areas for wildland fire fighting, backcountry rescues. Plus boundaries are very useful when working with large datasets so you can filter the data.
Once there is community approval, with only 1639 State Public Lands, this is a relatively easy import to do solo. I spread the manual conflation out over a few weeks. At this point the data is ready to be imported.
Data license: Public Domain
ODbL Compliance verified: yes
The original license is here, but reproduced here in case that link stops working. Looks like a standard public domain license. No source attribution required. That license is as follows:
This map is a product and property of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife, a division of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. Care should be taken in interpreting these data. Written documents may accompany this map and should be referenced. The Colorado Department of Natural Resources is not responsible and shall not be liable to the user for damages of any kind arising out of the use of data or information provided by the Department, including the installation of the data or information, its use, or the results obtained from its use. ANY DATA OR INFORMATION PROVIDED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MECHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Data or information provided by the Department of Natural Resources shall be used and relied upon only at the user’s sole risk, and the user agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the Department of Natural Resources, its officials, officers and employees from any liability arising out of the use of the data or information provided.
There are several files, the original data file from the State of Colorado, and the post conversion to GeoJson, and the final conflated data that I’d like to import.
The data import will be done manually using JOSM.
Luckily with only 1639 features in the entire state of Colorado, there is no need for data reduction. None of these State Wildlife Areas are in OSM already, and if they are in OSM, they’re usually just a POI of the parking lot. I did manual conflation using JOSM since the dataset is so small.
| Source | OSM |
|---|---|
| PropName | name |
| PropType | operator= |
| Acres | ignored |
| GlobalID | ignored |
The PROP_TYPE field has these values, which are primarily the operator.
| Source | OSM |
|---|---|
| Fishing Access | leisure=fishing |
| Hunting Access | access=yes |
| Recreation Area | landuse=recreation_ground |
| SAA | operator=State Administering Agency |
| SFU | operator=State Forestry Unit |
| SHA | operator=Summit Huts Association |
| SP | operator=State Parks |
| STL | operator=State Trust Lands |
| SWA | operator=State Parks & Wildlife |
| WWA | operator=Western Water Assessment |
| Other | ignored |
For the wildlife area boundaries, I added boundary=protected_area. For the few missing state parks, I added leisure=park. In Colorado admin_level has not been used for state parks and other similar areas. So none of these boundaries use admin_level. Most of the state parks are in OSM already, so this is other state lands not in OSM. (or Google either)
State Trust Lands are a bit different in that they are often private property, but limited public recreational use has been granted, typically only for hunting and fishing. The landowners get a tax break for this. Users do need to have a hunting or fishing license, and there is usually a sign in process to access the lands. For those I added access=permissive and landuse=recreation_ground, and boundary=administrative tag. More information on accessing State Trust Lands is here. They are also only accessible from Sept 1 to Feb 28. In some places that would be seasonal=winter, but not here in snowy Colorado, so added seasonal=yes.
As I was validating this data, of course I came across a few fuzzy issues with some of the original data around wildlife areas. For example Hunting Lease requires a permit, so access=permit instead of access=permissive. For those I also used landuse=recreation_ground. There’s a few for fishing too. I was tempted to add sport=fishing or sport=hunting, but those aren’t really OSM tags, so didn’t add them.
There’s also a fine line between landuse=recreation_ground, leisure=park, and boundary=protected_area, and the original data wasn’t always consistent. Most all State Wildlife area are protected_areas, and have zero amenities. Although these are protected, they all allow hunting when in season.
Some are purely recreational, for example boating on a reservoir. Those may have pit latrines and a boat ramp, but nothing else. Those are very common along the rivers for boating or rafting. Luckily I’ve been to many of these areas, so have some local insight about what they are used for. They are usually terrible camping, too noisy.
Any boundaries that had small in-holdings of private property I turned into proper multi-polygons. I only put the name on the outer polygon. It turns out that none of the inner polygons in the data had the name, so I had to grab that from one of the polygons.
And finally for debugging, I added a fixme=import to each feature, mainly so when cutting and pasting with JOSM I can identify what I’m adding. I’ll remove the tag before uploading after any requested changes, but it’s useful for the final conflation.
The data was initially converted using ogr2ogr as follows:
ogr2ogr -F GeoJson -t_srs "EPSG:4326" CWP_PublicAccess.geojson CPWPublicAccessProperties11032022.shpThe boundaries are a mix of relations and polygons.
With only 1639 features in the data file, I plan to do this as solo project. All of the data cleaning, conversion, and conflation has already been completed. Now all that is left is making any changes requested by the community, and uploading to OSM.
It’s a small file, so the entire dataset can be loaded into JOSM. It’s a nice luxury to be working with such a small dataset for a change. I’ll use a changeset hashtag of swa-import with the import user of rob-import (rob-import@senecass.com).
I did manual conflation, as some of the State Park boundaries are in OSM already, and there were only 83. For State Parks, only two had wildly different boundaries, so I replaced them with the more recent data. There’s a few private in-holdings not currently in OSM. Those I add, and made them an inner and turn the existing way into a relation. Also in the more recent data are a handful of new state parks. There was obviously a past high quality import of Colorado state parks so in the conflated data, there is very little added.
None of the State Wildlife Areas are in OSM, and that’s the majority of the boundaries. This is really obvious when you load OSM data and the wildlife boundaries in different layers. So that part has been much simpler.
I’ve been ground-truthing this data for several years, and it’s been accurate, and have been camping at some of them. I also have the State Facilities Data (future import), which although it’s only POIs, is useful to get the name and type of area. When the data isn’t clear what the name is, I usually ground-truth it. Whatever the sign says is the proper name.
If I can’t find suitable data to clear up confusion, it gets dropped onto a list for the next field trip. (next field maping trip late May-June 2024 on the way to and from SOTM-US)