I believe that the large and complex body of water that is the Saint Louis River Estuary, is incorrectly mapped as “Lake Superior”. In my understanding, the ‘natural’ outlet for the river is the natural channel between Minnesota Point and Wisconsin Point (see screenshot).
The estuary feature is locked and geometrically complex (many islands, bays, etc.). Also, it’s so big that the editing zoom-level restrictions are problematic.
So, two questions:
Do other users agree that the estuarian portion of the water body should NOT be tagged as Lake superior? It should be “Saint Louis River” or “Saint Louis River Estuary” and there is also at least one area within the estuary that has a lake name, “Spirit Lake” (which is a lake within the flowage of the Saint Louis River.
Can a smarter editor than me make the edit or recommend a method that would required the least amount of work? For example, can the shapes/polygons be ‘merged’ and just toss-out the incorrect tags, thereby not requiring any geometry edits?
I think your opinion about Lake Superior matches the USGS view too.
As far as editing, most of the geometry can be reused. The ways are part of a relation and the ways not on the lakeshore, but on the estuary shore can be removed from the relation. Along the spits, short connector ways should cross the mouth of the river and any other breaks in the spits and added to the Lake Superior relation and tagged as outer ways.
Subsequently, all the ways removed from the lake superior relation, but part of the estuary and the connectors on the spit, can be put into a new [multipolygon] relation as natural=water, water=river. Similar divisions can be made for other lakes in the estuary.
I’m not a fan of doing these big edits in iD, but JOSM makes it relatively easy.
I can’t make any of the edits described above using ID in browser and the ‘Lake Superior’ feature is locked-down.
Is there anyone out there who could more expertly make these changes?
There are two places where the actual lake ‘touches’ the river estuary:
1). ‘Wisconin entry’: 46.7064, -92.0167 (natural river outlet)
2). ‘Duluth entry’: 46.7791, -92.0922 (man-made canal)
Again, I appreciate all the help thus far. I think the edits are looking good.
One thing to clarify: it is my understanding that the ways that make up the boundary of the relationship for the river area should all be tagged with “natural=water” and “water=river”. But when I go to commit the edits they all have warnings that “The River Area should be a closed area based on the tag ‘natural=water’”
Am I doing something wrong, or misunderstanding?
All the tags for the multipolygon are on the relation itself. The error you are getting is probably because the error checker sees that you have an unclosed way with tags that are generally for a closed area.
Also, looking at the multipolygon for St Louis Estuary that is currently in OSM, you have the Spirit Lake multipolygon as an inner member. OSM multipolygons do not allow relations to be members, so only ways can be outer/inner members. Another requirement of OSM multipolygons is that inner members cannot touch outer members, so I don’t see any way that Spirit Lake can be a member of the St Louis Estuary multipolygon since it goes from bank to bank.
I think the way I would structure the data here would be to have three separate multipolygons:
1 for the part of the estuary upstream of Spirit lake with just natural=water, water=river tags,
2 for Spirit Lake as it stands (though remove the St Louis Stream Bank Protection area as an inner member)
3 Downstream area that contacts Lake Superior.
In this structure, 1 & 2 have a shared outer member at their boundary and 2&3 have a shared member at their boundary.
