Hey guise, I have been working on a Map Engine for my 2D RPG. The game takes place on an island, and a brand new random island each time you start a new game. So I wrote an Island Generator that produces maps that look something like this:



It's pretty easy to tell which areas of the map are deep/shallow water, beach, grassland, forest, or mountain. The map stores a 2D array of 'tiles'. Each 'tile' stores it's location on the map, the type of tile it is, etc. So now I want to be able to access each individual forest area from that 2D array.
There are six separate forest areas in the above picture. How could I access each area individually from the map? I'd like to do this so I can name each forest, make one or two haunted, or just play around with each one so they're each different from each other. It just makes the game that much more interesting if you understand what I mean. Any help is greatly appreciated. And for any of you who are interested in how I did the island generator, I have a blog post on what I did here, and the source code here under the downloads tab.

This old thread is on the same topic:
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/615697-finding-enclosed-tiles/

Basically, do what SiCrane says above or if you want to get fancy and not do floodfills, do the Two-pass algorithm here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected-component_labeling

I really appreciate all of your answers guys, thank you! I actually put a lot of thought into what was said, and I did implement what SiCrane mentioned. I used the floodfill algorithm to find the seperate forests, mountains, lakes, etc. and I also made it so the program cleans up the areas that are too small to be an actual forest, lake, mountain, etc.. So now if a 'forest' is small but not too small, it's a grove instead. If it IS too small, then we get rid of it. I did the same thing with the lakes and mountains too, so now the game not only has forests, lakes, mountains, but also groves, ponds, and caves, in addition to no more small patches of tree or rock areas that are wayy to small to be anything, resulting in a much cleaner, more realistic map. Thanks again for all of your ideas.