[Tagging] how to tag a salt flat

[joost schouppe]

Hi,

I haven't found much about the subject. A salt flat is a large deposit of
salt. They are usually where a river ends in the middle of a desert. Or
where a valley is completely surrounded by mountains, leaving no way out
for any water. So salt starts accumulating as salty waters evaporate. Some
of them rarely see any water, others are inundated every year or might be
under water a lot of the time. Because they tend to be dry most of the
time, and plants tend to dislike pure salt, they tend to look like a desert.

How should one tag such a thing? I've seen three very different ideas:

- they are a kind of desert, which happens to inundate from time to time.
Hence natural=desert and desert=salt. This seems to be the most popular
option (see http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/32082629 and
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/bJb )
- they are a kind of lake, which happens to be dry most of the time. Rarely
this is combined with water=salt_lake (for example:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1290108#map=10/-19.3280/-68.1139)
- they are a kind of wetland, which happens to be completely devoid of
vegetation (see
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:natural%3Dwetland#Salt_plains_.2B_intermittent_salt_lakes
 )

-- 
Joost @
Openstreetmap <http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/> |
Twitter <https://twitter.com/joostjakob> | LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joost-schouppe/48/939/603> | Meetup
<http://www.meetup.com/OpenStreetMap-Belgium/members/97979802/> | Reddit
<https://www.reddit.com/u/joostjakob> | Wordpress
<https://joostschouppe.wordpress.com/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20150929/b4d4c5ed/attachment.html>