[pacificpendant]

A long time ago, so the details are vague and may have changed, I was interested in adding trees and tagging their species in OSM. I asked some people that know more about OSM than me and was told that OSM doesn't want to store data that isn't used for rendering the maps.

There are sometimes links to external data in OSM using Wikidata for example.

[mpawelski]

Really? There are OSM wiki articles that describes how to tag tree species [0]. The usage also seems to be pretty high [1].

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:species [1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/species#chronology

[habi]

The standard layer on osm.org (OSM Carto) does render trees/forests differently, depeding how the trees are tagged. Search for 'leaftype' on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:OSM_Carto_rende... to see for yourself.