I’ve been mapping in Alaska for quite some time now, with a specific interest in mapping national parks, forests, and other protected areas. It has become apparent to me that much of the state, with the exception of southeast Alaska, lacks sufficient hydrographic data in the map. I’ve been working on chipping away at this problem intermittently, adding lakes and named waterways. However, given the size of interior Alaska’s national and state parks, attempting large scale additions by hand would be prohibitively time consuming.

I’ve gained a good deal of familiarity over the years with the software needed to perform an import of USGS National Hydrographic Dataset data to fill this gap. My current idea is to download the needed NHD dataset from the USGS website, convert it to .shp in QGIS, delete all tags from the data and split it to smaller files. I would then load the raw shapes into JOSM using the opendata plugin and add tags manually. I would avoid conflicts with existing data by loading it into the editor prior to loading the .shp, thus allowing me to integrate the data more seamlessly.

I am aware that it is customary to receive community buy in before beginning an import project. I’ve run into some confusion on this as Alaska has a very small OSM community that is not well established. I could contact a few mappers individually, but I am not sure if that alone would satisfy the need for community buy in.

I’m curious as to what input people have on this