Hello everyone. I’m trying to map local rivers and lakes based on my and my friends’ paddling experience, and I have some questions.
1. Beaches. According to the wiki, a beach is an area of land near water, tagged with natural=beach + surface=*. The surface types I have seen so far include sand, shingle/gravel, bare rock, mud, and even clay. However, there is a problem - such surface tags currently render only sand, gravel, or shingle. Is it appropriate to use natural=bare_rock instead of natural=beach + surface=bare_rock near water bodies?
2. Shallow water surfaces. I have almost the same question for mapping shallow water surfaces - let’s say less than 50 cm deep (this is quite useful to understand that there’s a possibility my kayak will come into contact with sand, gravel, or rocks on the bottom). So far, I’ve found that natural=reef or natural=shoal + surface=* could fit for this. Which would be better to use in your opinion?
There are also some new tags, such as logjams or beaver dams, that I would like to propose. Where is it better to do this - on GitHub?
Regarding surface=* I’m not sure how convenient it is to use it to describe the material at the bottom of a waterway, considering the action of water with respect to material transport and external events and “the surface key describes the physical surface of roads, footpaths and other surface features, particularly regarding material composition and structure”.
You should first investigate whether any proposals have been made before or if there is any documentation on the matter; in the case of beaver dams, you are not the first to have this concern and there’s a talk about it.
I think operator=beaver is quite original. (I thought it was a joke in the conversation, but it does exist).
A brief consultation in OverPass-Turbo It yields interesting results.
Furthermore, there are people with more experience who can better explain all the questions raised in this post.
natural=bare_rock is appropriate on shores. Strictly speaking, such formations (abrasive shores) aren’t beaches, because beaches are formed by accumulation of sand or gravel.
After you’ve mapped the details, what map are you going to be looking at them in? A lot of mapped features unfortunately don’t show on the standard OSM Carto display
Are the rivers & lakes tidal?
Near here, paddlers have mapped various points & other features that don’t show up: OpenStreetMap with more visible as you go up & down the Creek.
These are both indented for areas where the shallow area is surrounded (or nearly surrounded) by deeper water. They shouldn’t really be used for general areas sloping up to the shoreline.
We do have the little used seamark:seabed_area:surface=* that could be used here, although I don’t really see any improvement over a general surface tag. For what it’s worth OsmAnd Seems to have partial support for this in its “Nautical Map View” plugin (not that I’d trust OSM to avoid running aground).
Tag proposals are documented on the wiki and (these days) mostly discussed on this forum. If you go the proposal route there’s a whole process for that, although for niche tags this might not be worth the effort. You can still use any tags you like, but it’s usually worth at least asking for opinions here as there may be issues with the way people would tend to interpret here.
I do agree, thats why i want to find proper solution.
Lets looks at example. Below is photo of river shallows, that part of river is about 200m, consists mainly brick sized rocks. Depth is about 5-30cm thru most part of year.
Kayaks and paddleboards can easily get stuck on rocks, so you have to drag them on foot.
If you use the default OSMAnd profile (showing a globe) & also enable “Whitewater sports” under “Routes” the various sport=canoe & waterway=hazard nodes appear, together with there descriptions e.g. OpenStreetMap is rendered as a danger symbol (white ! on a red triangle) that when you click on it, shows as “Whitewater hazard” with description (under Details) “Very shallow at low tide”!
So it would appear that if you just tag a waterway=hazard node at every awkward spot, that should work for you!
