1 through 4 would be flowerbed, most of these patches do bloom and beautifully so, it’s just that most of the year they look like funky grasses. I’d use grassland for both 5 and 6. Meadow implies grazing or hay production, maybe a little counterintuitively to the word’s colloquial usage, both in English and Slovak, I suppose. So I guess that’s out of question except for areas positively known to be grazed or mown for production, or for special cases like the insects you mentioned, or for protecting rare species, like they do for orchids in Biele Karpaty.

I do know of several meadows in the city, they’re on Devinska Kobyla and they’re grazed by municipal goats kept by Devinska Nova Ves, lovely project.

Heath I would avoid, it’s very specific, it’s a narrow group of species which create the typical landscape, vresovisko, I’m told it’s called. Not uncommon in the UK, but I don’t think there’s any heath in Bratislava.

The last two images linked are, I’d say, shrubbery. They’re small, but artificially shaped, which is typical for human-managed shrubbery, and there’s shrubbery:density=* to help distinguish the big, dense impassable ones from smaller, decorative ones like these. In case there’s an area with an equal amount of flowers and trimmed shrubs, I’d say shrubbery should take priority, because it’s more visible and it acts as a barrier. Not that people should trample on flowers, of course. But if it’s mostly flowers with a few shrubs inbetween, we can map the shrubs individually within a flowerbed - unlike flowers within shrubbery, that would be uh… nanomapping?

While we’re at it, another green conundrum I came across are the green tram tracks in Karlova Ves. @Spr3 set them as landcover=sedum for the lack of a better tag. They’re pretty enough when in bloom to make me consider flowerbed, but that simply isn’t the landuse, the landuse is railway amd the flowers are the landcover or surface. I couldn’t come up with anything better than landcover=sedum, so I’m open to any suggestions if you have them. Maybe it’s good enough, but it would be the only use in the world. I’ve checked a couple of cities with sedum covered tram tracks. They either don’t have these areas mapped, and those which do have them tagged as landuse=grass, which is incorrect, both because the land is used for tram tracks, and because sedum is not a grass.

Lovely, I think we’re in full agreement here, except I went and mapped quite a few individual trees on some of these grass areas, oops. It wouldn’t cross my mind to try and map individual trees in forests, but here it’s often doable, even with groups of, say, 15 trees, if they’re spread out. How would you choose when to map them as individual trees or groups? So far I went mostly by density, mapping dense clusters as groups an clearly distinguishable trees as nodes.

And yes, I’d prefer not using greenery for precisely the reason you mention - it defies the point of micromapping.

@ticho2 I wrote to @aceman444, he said he needed a couple of days but would check it out, but it’s been two weeks now and some of his changeset comments I saw earlier suggest he wouldn’t be completely against this, so I suppose we can go ahead with it, and if the need arises, finetune the details later.

I’ll start at the Karlova Ves tram terminus and work my way along the track. I’ll leave Dlhe Diely for later, or to you, since I don’t go there much and I’m currently sick anyway, so I’ll stick to areas I know well enough without having to go out.

As for the trees, I’ll still try to primarily map them as single trees or tree rows (Mapbox was shot in winter or late autumn here, very helpful), but I won’t shy away from tree_group when I can’t place the trees precisely enough.

@Tomas_J Yea, nothing renders it, but it’s the same as with shrubbery. As an area equivalent of tree (node) and tree row (way), there’s no other tag which fulfills its purpose, so I’d like to play the long game here and slowly work on increasing its usage, so that it may get noticed by renderer developers in the future. The wiki doesn’t define it precisely, but usage is what shapes young and vaguely defined tags the best.

I considered sending an email to the group, but so far everyone I spoke to seems to be in favour of not mapping these as parks, so I’m inclined to just go ahead with fixing it. It might be worth discussing for Slovakia as a whole, but my intention was really to allow me to progress with mapping in Karlova Ves. I’d like to go ahead with that, as my patience for mapping is rather episodic.

I might broach the topic again with the group later, when I’m somewhat done with my project, but if anyone feels like leading this discussion on a country-wide level sooner, feel free to!

@SeverinGeo They’re not at all gardens, they’re really park-like areas, but sometimes small community gardens are embedded in them and we map those separately.

Thanks for the input. Even if we ignore how people use them, I think the most important thing is, they’re not meant to be parks. You’re free to use the spaces, but they don’t always conform to the idea of a park. Looking at the examples on your link, it seems yours are much more park-y.

Here they’re really areas that fill the spaces between blocks and within blocks, which contain some park amenities to make them pleasant and lend them the function of a park, but not always - and that’s what either creates massive inconsistencies, or really stretches the definition of park in some places.

It’s easier to consider them case by case if they’re as disjointed and scarce as in your example and so I’d totally go with park if they were like that.

I’ve tried to get into the mailing group before, but it doesn’t seem to play nice without a google account. I’ll just try a direct message here.

I wasn’t planning on doing this beyond Karlova Ves at the moment, so it wouldn’t be that much of a mass edit, but yeah, if we can get the local community to agree on this, perhaps it could be done en masse for consistency, too.

Nope, I’ll try in the note.

I wonder if we can tag people here? @aceman444 I summon thee

Glad to see I’m not alone.

Yeah, tree group it’s one of the less used ones. Carto doesn’t render it, but nor does it show natural=shrubbery (despite multiple proposals and almost 100k uses), but fortunately, we don’t tag for the renderer. Both tree group and shrubbery are important building blocks in micromapping urban green areas.

One thing to be solved if we do start using tree group is, do we just plop it onto the grass, or do we make multipolygons out of it so that they don’t overlap? I think leaving them overlapping better represents reality, since there’s grass usually under the trees themselves. Just like we don’t make holes around tree nodes and tree rows.