For sure that is true for the majority of trees. Cluttering up the OpenStreetMap database with lots of Callery pears, London planetrees, and Eucalyptus along streets, for example, would not be a good idea, timewise and otherwise. Adding only some of the interesting trees, due to their size, rarity, historic significance, or educational value would be best.
As to why some of the tree mapping should be contributed to OpenStreetMap, I was thinking about how to present that viewpoint just a little while ago during a walk in the woods. Then upon arriving home, I was pleased to find this:
Accordingly, the community around a college campus is a great interdisciplinary educational and research laboratory, which is true of the rest of a community as well. OpenStreetMap has great data on streets, historic landmarks, train stations, other built infrastructure, and natural features, such as bodies of water. Integrating some interesting trees into those maps offers a more complete picture of what is there. As an example, mapping a male and a female Ginkgo biloba near a school, college campus, or anywhere would be of value.
In addition to the Seattle Tree Inventory Map mentioned above, there are other mapping projects that offer a more complete tree database than what is appropriate for OpenStreetMap. Some were noted above. There is also the New York City Tree Map. But unlike those projects, OpenStreetMap integrates lots of different kinds of data onto a map, and that is why selected trees should be there as well.
OpenStreetMap does enable some some data regarding the size of the tree to be included, but perhaps more is needed.
Thanks for the Baobab!
One of the reasons for starting this discussion was to seek opinions regarding how the scientific name of a tree is stored. Note this in the original post:
"species": "Quercus imbricaria",
If both the genus and species epithet are to be included, the convention on OpenStreetMap is to associate the entire name with the "species" key, and to omit the "genus" key. If only the genus is known, the "species" key is omitted and the "genus" key is used, which does seem appropriate. I’m not sure about the former, though, which seems to be to avoid redundancy by omitting the "genus" key. iNaturalist does enable a more elaborate system for storing scientific names than that. What are your opinions regarding how it is done on OpenStreetMap? The following may be of interest in thinking about that and the other information on OpenStreetMap associated with a mapped tree: Tag:natural=tree.