Along with many other folks, I’ve been exploring @_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ 's OSM River Basins map (original announcement thread), and connecting missing links in rivers and streams. In order to make a fully connected waterway network, it seems to be a fairly widespread practice to map linear waterway features through lakes. When looking at smaller lakes with a waterway=stream or waterway=river through the middle, this makes sense to me. The water flows somewhere and the lines help show this. It does seem a little odd to be tagging these lines as streams or rivers when they are in the middle of lakes. Perhaps not a problem though. It seems that mappers often leave these lines without a name tag. This also makes sense to me since a lake will most often have a different name than a river that flows into or out of it.
Once I started to see “rivers” mapped through very large lakes, though, this started to feel perhaps not quite right. Here are.a couple of examples:
Lake Ladoga
Lake Huron
I also noticed the same sort of mapping with some large estuaries. These are outside the coastline so it feels even a bit weirder to be mapping “rivers” through them. Some examples:
Saint Lawrence Estuary
Chesapeake Bay
I also found some large lakes and elongated gulfs that do not have waterway lines mapped through them. Examples:
Bristol Channel
What do you think? Should waterways be mapped through very large lakes or not? How about estuaries or elongated gulfs or bays that are outside the coastline? If waterway lines should be mapped through these water bodies, what value should be used? Is the common practice of using waterway=river acceptable or should a new waterway value (or several) be developed?
23 posts - 14 participants
Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/should-river-lines-be-mapped-through-lakes-estuaries-gulfs-and-other-large-water-bodies/104438