Plantations : woods, forests or something else?

Poplars at Lakenheath
CC-BY-SA 2.0   © Copyright Alison Rawson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

One type of woodland area I have alluded to a couple of times in the past are plantations (see here and here). I've always been frustrated at not having found good illustrations, but in the past couple of weeks I've noted a few which either already have good open images available or I've been able to snap a picture myself.

Plantations run the gamut from small areas to fully-fledged forests. In general what connects them is that the trees are planted in orderly rows, and the plantation has an expected lifetime, after which the trees will be harvested or replanted. Photographs enable some of the variety to be shown. In turn this should highlight the sorts of information we might want to capture by OpenStreetMap tags.

Shops in Coalville

I had not planned to do much mapping on the Bank Holiday Sunday: the day was set aside for a meeting of the British Plant Gall Society at Ryton Woods, Warwickshire.

Oak with Hazel coppice stools, Ryton Wood.
The ground layer changes here with bramble (in foreground) absent deeper into the wood.
Just to the left of the foreground hazel a bank & ditch can just be discerned. This is probably the remnants of a woodland compartment dating back to the Middle Ages.

The only thing I expected to map were paths in the wood, which surprisingly are almost all unmapped (hint to Mappa Mercia folks). This is one of the best areas of ancient woodland in the county and only a short distance from Coventry and Warwick. In fact, if anything, I would have expected to write about this wood which is mainly Oak with Hazel coppice.

Coalville : Hotel Street in 1988.
The Railway Hotel is now a day nursery, and the buildings on the left beyond have recently been demolished.
The Railway was one of a cluster of pubs adjacent to the level crossing and station: the others continue as pubs.
Source Ben Brookshank, Geograph via Wikimedia Commons

Woodland Cartography

This is an expanded version of my talk at sotm-eu:

I start by seeking inspiration from the many ways in which woods and trees have been shown on maps in the past, and then consider what elements we may want for OSM data, and how we might depict such elements.