[Tagging] natural=bay on areas

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 27 March 2017, Andrew Harvey wrote:
> > It is a bay of the Tasman Sea/Pacific Ocean.  Ecologically it is a
> > fully
>
> maritime waterbody.
>
> What do you mean by "maritime waterbody"?

A waterbody where plant and animal life matches or is close to that of 
the sea rather to that of a river or lake.

> Botany Bay is unlike many conventional bays which are on the
> coastline and part of the sea. You're right that these types of bays
> are part of the sea and ocean, and other times they are part of a
> river, but botany bay is really a river nor sea, if anything Botany
> Bay sounds much more like an Esturary.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary

In OSM we have no separate tagging for estuaries, this would not make 
sense because it would just introduce yet another boundary problem 
(where the river turns into the esturary and where the esturary turns 
into the ocean).  An esturary is the transit of a river into the ocean.  
If you consider the Botany Bay to be part of the esturary of Georges 
River you still have to decide where you place the coastline and if you 
place it below the bay you have to tag the bay waterway=riverbank or 
natural=water + water=river.  Creating a separate waterbody that is not 
part of the river but within the coastline is wrong in our current 
tagging scheme.

Note in general the esturary of Georges River would be considered to 
start much further upstream, likely somewhere around here:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/-33.9765/151.0237

at the transit from a meandering river to a ria 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ria).

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/