England Local Nature Reserves (LNR) import

This page refers to the import of Local Nature Reserves (LNR) in England. The data used is provided by UK's Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs via Find open data portal (data.gov.uk).

Goals

As of September 2023 many Local Nature Reserves (LNR) in England are missing in OSM, while there are ca. ~2k LNR's present in the database of data.gov.uk.

The goal of the import is to add the missing LNR's into the OSM database.

Legal

Data source site (as at September 2023): https://environment.data.gov.uk/explore/9364d6af-927e-4349-b4c3-dbaf7acb842d

Type of license: Open Government Licence

ODbL Compliance verified: yes

Dedicated upload account: tbd

The import has been discussed on the OSM import mailing list.

Dataset

The dataset is available at the Find open data portal, precisely at this page.

The data is presented in multiple formats incl. Shapefile (*.shp) and this format will be used for the import.

The data (Local_Nature_Reserves_England.shp) has a collection of outlines and detailed information, for each LNR.

There are several details available for each LNR with the following keys:

• area
• easting0
• easting
• gid
• gis_date
• latitude
• lnr_area
• lnr_name
• longitude
• northing0
• northing
• reference
• st_area_sh
• st_perimet
• status
• version

Import process

Basically 5 steps will be made for the import of the data:

1. downloading the data
2. cleaning of the useless information of dataset;
3. changing dataset key names in valid OSM key names;
4. adding other keys,
5. importing all the elements of the dataset as way/multipolygon in OSM using opendata plug-in.

The first step will be made using Mozilla Firefox, all the others steps will be made JOSM.

In the second step:

• the data will be filtered leaving only lnr_name and reference.

In the third step, for each LNR:

• lnr_name will be changed to name
• reference will be changed to ref

In the fourth step, for each LNR, the tags will be added:

• leisure=nature_reserve
• boundary=protected_area
• source:geometry=DEFRA ???

After step four the ready *.osm file would be as tbd.

In the fifth step an upload of the outlines will be executed in bunches of no more than 100 elements/changeset in order to carefully cope with the data and revert them easily using JOSM's Reverter plug-in, should something go wrong.

People involved

• data preparing & import process - tbd

• technical & legal consultation -szydzio

Problems and improvements

I expect some problems with the import like e.g.:

1. some LNR's may have outlines consisting of more than one line (way) - they will be uploaded as multipolygons
2. some LNR's may already be present in the OSM database - they will be left unchanged, before the import for each place where a new LNR would be uploaded, data from OSM will be downloaded with JOSM using API Overpass and compared with the to be uploaded data, in order not to produce duplicated objects with this import

QA

• Verification of data from local knowledge

Schedule

The changesets will be uploaded starting from - tbd