Putting animals on the map

OpenStreetMap aims to collect world wide local geographic knowledge and create a map by the people for the people. Practically there is, however, a substantial gap between that lofty ideal and the practical reality of mapping.

A very good example to illustrate this mismatch between the ideal and reality of OpenStreetMap is animal related infrastructure. Animal husbandry is of enormous economic and social importance in huge parts of the world and accounts for a substantial portion of landuse world wide and wild animals and structures they create form a significant part of ecosystems. This is, however, not reflected in practical mapping in OpenStreetMap. Mapping of animal related infrastructure and landuse is quite marginal and most mapping and tagging concepts in that domain are quite shallow semantically compared to other fields of mapping. More than that, mapping of animal related infrastructure is dominated by infrastructure related to pets.

This reflects the massive over-representation of urban populations among mappers in OpenStreetMap. Since animal husbandry and livestock management are primarily pursued in rural areas, many mappers are essentially out of touch with this whole domain.

And this bias is also reflected in maps produced from OpenStreetMap data of course. Even the differentiated depiction of agriculture in general (where mapping is somewhat more widespread and more in depth than for animal husbandry) is rare in OSM based maps while non-pet animal related elements are almost completely absent.

OSM-Carto, as a very rich map that depicts and differentiates a lot of things, currently shows the following features at least partly animal related in a wider sense:

• leisure=dog_park – awkwardly with the same base color as playgrounds
• landuse=meadow – only shown rudimentarily in the same way as all other grassy landcovers
• amenity=veterinary – point symbol and name label, with symbol implying this to be pets related
• barrier=cattle_grid/barrier=kissing_gate/barrier=stile – point barrier typically used to block animals but let pedestrians pass through, shown with a point symbol
• shop=pet – point symbol and name label
• amenity=hunting_stand – point symbol
• leisure=bird_hide – point symbol

Retrospect on agricultural landuses

Before i go to discuss new map design concepts i want to take a look back on the extensions of rendering agricultural landuses and animal related infrastructure i had introduced previously. This primarily amounted to differentiating landuse=farmland and landuse=orchard by crop and trees.

In addition i recently introduced rendering of acquacultures:

Meadow types

The first and most obvious component in depicting elements in the map that are related to animal husbandry is showing land being used for grazing animals and for growing food for animals. There is no general landuse=pasture tag in OpenStreetMap though. And it would make only limited sense since the types of landcover and vegetation used for grazing animals varies a lot world wide. What is well established (due to the focus of mapping in OSM on temperate zone regions) is meadow=pasture as a secondary tag to landuse=meadow for indicating grass covered areas used as lifestock pasture. It is, unfortunately, not common to differentiate the type of animal gazing there. There is, however, a similar tag in the form of meadow=paddock that essentially means pasture for horses. In addition there is meadow=agricultural – which indicates grass being grown for hay production – not necessarily, but practically predominantly for being fed to animals.

At large polygons sizes this adds a regular pattern to the grass-green color fill background. But note that at small polygon sizes for meadow=pasture and meadow=paddock i switch to a single symbol pattern (which i first introduced for sport pitches). This reduces the likeliness that at small polygon sizes all symbols are cut off at the edges and are therefore not well readable.

The symbol used for meadow=pasture is showing a generic quadruped animal – the same symbol shape is also used in other designs shown in the following. The symbol used for meadow=paddock depicts a horse.

Meadow orchards

As a not strictly animal related change, but more an extension for agricultural landuse depiction, i also added distinct rendering for meadow orchards. There are two variants of mapping those – either with landuse=meadow and meadow=meadow_orchard or landuse=orchard and orchard=meadow_orchard. For the former the natural design approach is to combine a grass-green base color fill with a tree symbol pattern. For the latter this is more tricky, because tree symbols alone point towards (and are used for – see above) landuse=orchard + trees=apple_trees or similar. I chose a two-symbol pattern consisting of darker trees mixed with brighter grass symbols. This is somewhat more noisy in the results, but should transport the meaning. The single symbol version either uses one of each of these symbols (at very small polygon sizes) or a tree symbol between two grass symbols (at somewhat larger polygon sizes).

Where animals are kept

There are also a number of primary tags to map places where animals are kept and managed that have some (though rather limited) adoption in OpenStreetMap. I render four of these with a traditional point symbol and name label and with a polygon fill in the same color as landuse=farmyard when mapped with a polygon.

Those tags are:

• landuse=animal_keeping – which is used for infrastructure where animals are kept for use, for example as work animals or for riding, but not for breeding and growing them. This is primarily used for horses.
• amenity=animal_breeding – which is used for places where animals are kept either for breeding/growing or for producing secondary products like milk.
• amenity=animal_boarding – which is used for places that take care of pets temporarily while their owner has not time to do so.
• amenity=animal_shelter – which is used for all kind of infrastructure sheltering animals, including, but not limited to facilities taking care of abandoned pets and injured wild animals. It is also used for structures sheltering animals from the weather like dog houses.

All of these are differentiated by type of animal if that is tagged using animal_keeping=*/animal_breeding=*/amenity=animal_boarding=*/animal_shelter=*. The animal types shown in the following are the ones for which i designed symbols. These are the most common ones currently tagged.

All combinations shown are supported. As indicated amenity=animal_boarding is really only applicable for pets, you can tag amenity=animal_boarding + animal_boarding=cow, but it is going to be shown with the generic amenity=animal_boarding symbol.

In addition to varying the design of the symbol the type of animal also influences the starting zoom levels at which symbol and label get shown. Facilities for large animals like horses and cows get shown earlier than others.

Revisiting dogs

I also took the opportunity to address a sore spot in the style that had be left open since the AC-Style was started in 2017 – dog parks.

One of the main initial goals of the AC-Style was to move to a more systematic design of the color scheme for landcover fill colors – a goal that i consider largely accomplished in the first few years of the project – see various blog posts discussing this. Rendering of leisure=dog_park, however – which, in OSM-Carto, is using the same base color as leisure=playground – was left unchanged so far (though i changed the playground color – hence this weird color match was resolved).

I have now decided to include this in the design framework for animal infrastructure with the farmyard color as base and a pattern showing a dog profile view – which is more specific than the generic paw symbol using in OSM-Carto, which could refer to any animals with paws.

Small animals

Not all animals for which humans build infrastructure are large – i also included some insect related features. There is landuse=apiary for areas where beehives are placed:

and related to that there is also a tag for individual beehives (man_made=beehive) – which i depict at z19+ together with man_made=insect_hotel.

Feeding and watering

Finally, there is infrastructure for animals to feed and drink. amenity=feeding_place i already showed above to be differentiated according to the type of animal. Like with the larger animal related features rendered with a point symbol i vary the starting zoom level depending on the size of the animal (and indirectly the size of the feeding place) – places for horses, cows etc. start at z18 while places for cats, dogs and birds only at z19. amenity=game_feeding – since predominantly mapped in areas with otherwise low feature density – is shown even earlier.

In addition i tried a subtle differentiation by the type of food – showing hay, grain and salt in different colors, similar to what i previously did for silos and mines – though with a much smaller color accent. For salt this is poorly visible in front of the standard background color, but much better on most vegetation related landcovers.

And amenity=watering_place is shown with the same symbol shape as amenity=feeding_place – just in the blue color of water related features. In addition to the plain static symbol rendering i also depict combinations with other water related tags using symbol augmentation.

As with previously introduced symbol augmentation for water related features this dynamically adjusts to context:

Conclusions

I have shown here how limited current established mapping practice in OpenStreetMap is regarding animal related infrastructure and landuse, but also how the somewhat established tags can be depicted in maps. And how a domain of animal related cartography can this way be introduced into OSM based digital maps.

In summary i would like to explain a bit the reasoning behind using certain designs and design techniques for some feature types while using other methods for other classes of features.

The animal related meadow variants use a coarse animal symbol pattern. This reflects that such areas are often larger and frequently contain other features the readability of which might be negatively affected by a dense pattern. Because of the coarse pattern, switching to a single symbol pattern at small polygon sizes is very helpful here to ensure the design stays clearly readable at those polygon sizes. meadow=agricultural, on the other hand, indicates a usually fairly homogeneous plantation of grass for mowing, which is represented by a much more dense pattern, even at small polygon sizes.

The features for keeping animals are rendered with a traditional point symbol and name label underneath. This reflects the use of the tag on both nodes and polygons – and in case of polygons often also in combination with a building tag. So a fill pattern is not a viable way to visualize these. leisure=dog_park and landuse=apiary, on the other hand, use patterns again.

The animal symbols used to indicate the type of animal a feature is used for almost universally feature a profile view – only the cat and wildlife symbols use a rotated head for being better recognizable. Not all of them strictly fit into the 14×14 pixel frame and they are obviously not to scale. But most of them should be fairly recognizable for what they are meant to represent. The only class of animal that is somewhat problematic to depict is the wildlife/game class because a deer as a type taxon for wildlife is not universally fitting world wide. This would be something that could be differentiated regionally. This could, however, also mislead the map user to assume the symbol indicates a more specific animal species, while the feature in question is tagged non-specifically for all kind of local wildlife.

Regarding the design techniques – in addition to various techniques i used and discussed previously i introduced a number of new techniques as part of this project, specifically:

• use of regular patterns with several different pictorial symbols in different colors at different grid positions
• use of single symbol patterns for small polygon features in a way that harmonically transits to a regular pattern at larger polygon sizes

Practical examples

Because of the low importance animal related features have in mapping in OpenStreetMap it is not that easy to show a broad spectrum of practical examples. For quite a few of the features i introduce rendering for here i had to search in my test database quite a bit to find some good real world examples. Here they are.