This repository is a staging area for National Forest Service data to be uploaded into OpenStreetmaps. National data available from http://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php include:

• Administrative Forest Boundaries (S_USA.AdministrativeForest.shp)
• Wilderness Areas (S_USA.Wilderness.shp)
• Wilderness Areas: Legal Status (S_USA.WildernessStatus.shp)

Currently I am focusing on regions in the Inland Northwest (roughly between the Cascades and the Continental Divide), particularly Idaho, which has none of its over 20 million acres of National Forest land in OSM.

The files in the osm directory have been converted to WGS-84 datum and OSM format. Before uploading to OSM directly, more quality control needs to be done. For example, polygons should be validated and split to no more than 2000 vertices. After that, they should be checked against data already in OSM to resolve any conflicts (for example, part of Colville National Forest is already in OSM).

For example, the administrative boundary for Boise National Forest was converted with:

$ ogr2ogr -fid 38 -f "ESRI Shapefile" -t_srs EPSG:4326 Boise.shp S_USA.AdministrativeForest.shp

and exported to OSM with the JOSM editor.

GeoJSON files are provided for convenience, they are simplified versions of the geometries in the .osm files but can be rendered directly on GitHub. The resolution of the GeoJSON files should be very good, but they are not identical to the originals.