Duplicate GNIS Id's for reservoirs leading to somewhat conflicting names

Communities United States
1

I’m looking at the maproulette challenge to “Combine redundant reservoir nodes and areas (US)”. In the happy case this is a closed way tagged natural=water and a single node with a name, elevation and gnis:feature_id tagged as reservoir. Merging them resolves the redundant mapping.

But, now I stumbled over a case where there seem to be two different gnis id’s for the same reservoir. And they come with different names.

At first I thought, oh well, not a huge conflict. It’s reservoir 9 either way, so I put one in the name and the other into alt_name and left a note Way: ‪Soil Conservation Service Site 9 Reservoir‬ (‪166174521‬) | OpenStreetMap

However, after thinking about this some more, it seems probable that this is not a single occurrence and might actually be a bit annoying/confusing. Indeed if I poke around a bit with overpass

[out:json][timeout:120];
{{radius=75000}}
(
// nwr['name'~'Soil Conservation Service Site', i](around:{{radius}},{{geocodeCoords:Dallas}});
nwr['name'~'Reservoir Number', i](around:{{radius}},{{geocodeCoords:Dallas}});
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

I find lots of “Soil Conservation…” objects and also a bunch of “Reservoir Number …”. Now that’s a bit of a naive search of course, but it gives an idea. And since the same issue seems to exist for dams, we can find gems like:

  • “Reservoir Number One Hundred Twentyone” next to
  • “Soil Conservation Service Site 121 Dam”

So, I’m wondering which of these names is … “better” and what to do with this.

2 Likes
2

PS: I mentioned the “Combine” MapRoulette challenge above, but there are other related ones:

  • “Convert Reservoir Nodes to Areas (US)” MapRoulette and
  • “Arizona Springs and Reservoirs” MapRoulette and
  • “Convert dam nodes to ways in the U.S.A.” MapRoulette
3

It’s difficult to determine which name is in use currently based on GNIS data alone. There are a large amount of duplicate and outdated names which require close examination to fix. I agree with your choice to add the more generic “Reservoir Number Nine” as `alt_name`.

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can email GNIS_manager@usgs.gov with the duplicate entries, and they will remove one of them from the database. This doesn’t impact the imported nodes in OSM, of course, but it might help someone else in the future. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
4

Well the United States Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service transitioned in 1992 to be the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, so the name is sorta outdated. The USGS lifted the names / reference numbers from some named watershed project of the Soil Conservation Service, which would be a better name, much like the Department of Interior Bureau of Reclamation refers to their irrigation dam projects. The Soil Conservation Service watershed program typically was for erosion control and waterway stabilization, not so much irrigation- the dams and reservoirs created thusly remain in local ownership not federal, so it wouldn’t be appropriate to rename as “Natural Resources Conservation Service” sites. I suggest the “alt_name” tag and for GNIS:feature_id to use l semicolon “;” separated values

5

Another datapoint: the National Inventory of Dams continues to call the dam “Grays Creek WS SCS Site 9 Dam”. The dam’s owner, the Navarro Soil and Water Conservation District, may have its own naming scheme.