Hi,

Thanks for reaching out—and I really do appreciate the time and thought you’ve put into mapping this area, especially having visited it in person and using satellite imagery to assess the vegetation. That kind of careful work is valuable and helps improve the quality of the map.

I wanted to explain more fully why I deleted the polygon and why I believe very large ground cover polygons can present challenges in OpenStreetMap, even when they aren’t extremely complex in terms of vertices or relationships.

There are a few reasons this approach can become problematic:

Editing Performance and Stability: When large polygons do have many relationships—whether now or in the future—they become harder for the editor to render and manage. I’ve run into slowdowns, errors, and rendering issues, especially when trying to work within large multipolygons that have lots of inner components.

Error Tracking: If there's an issue like an unclosed way or a small geometry error, it's much harder to find and fix in a large polygon with many relationships. The bigger and more complex the structure, the harder it is to debug.

Broad-Stroke Mapping: These large polygons tend to “paint with a broad brush.” Even if accurate in general, they often don’t reflect local variation and make it more difficult to add detailed features like parks, campgrounds, water bodies, or residential areas. These features can end up overlapping or needing to be added as inner polygons, which increases complexity.

Long-Term Maintenance: From experience—including work I did around Zion National Park—I've found that large polygons often need to be broken up as more detail gets added. I initially tried to keep large polygons in place, but the amount of relationships they accumulated made them hard to edit, prone to errors, and increasingly fragile over time.

Future Development: In this particular case, the area around St. George is going through ongoing and upcoming development. I expect more roads, buildings, parks, dams, and reservoirs to be mapped in the near future. Leaving a large polygon over the area makes detailed editing more difficult for those contributors.

Even though the polygon in question didn’t yet have inner relationships, I felt it was still contributing to the broader issue I’ve seen emerging in the region. I’ve noticed more large polygons like this popping up in the St. George area, and I believe addressing this pattern now will make it easier for contributors to add and maintain detail moving forward.

I’m absolutely not trying to dismiss your work—it’s clear you’ve put real effort into it. I just wanted to offer a full explanation of my thinking and experience with these kinds of issues. If you'd like, I’d be happy to collaborate on a revised approach to mapping ground cover in this area that balances broader context with local detail.

Thanks again, and I appreciate you taking the time to follow up.