[Tagging] dry swamps

[Tod Fitch]

In the deserts of the southwest United States there are features that could probably use similar help in tagging. In California they usually have “Dry Lake” in the name (assuming they are named). At least one in Arizona has “Playa” (Spanish for beach or shallow) in its name. From your description, they may get water more often than the “dry swamps” you write about but the tagging is similarly unclear.

At present the Wilcox Playa in Arizona is tagged with:

intermittent=yes
name=Willcox Playa
natural=water
note=This area is dry, not water or wetland.
type=multipolygon
wikidata=Q8003532
wikipedia=en:Willcox Playa

While a California example is tagged with:

name=Soda Dry Lake
natural=mud
wikidata=Q81309
wikipedia=en:Soda Lake (San Bernardino County)

This could be an interesting discussion and maybe we can arrive at tagging that works outside of Australia as well as accurately describe your dry swamps.

Cheers,
Tod

> On Feb 11, 2023, at 2:07 AM, Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> The ‘dry swamp’ has no apparent way to tag it. These will not be found in Europe, just as you don’t find deserts there. 
> They have occasional water, not seasonal, not yearly but, say, between 5 to 20 years they have water. As such they do not satisfy the OSM swamp definitions at all. 
> See https://theconversation.com/why-a-wetland-might-not-be-wet-103687 <https://theconversation.com/why-a-wetland-might-not-be-wet-103687> for more on their characteristics, at least in Australia. OSM has access to a imagery source in Australia that maps them, so OSM has a legal source for them. What is needed is a tag for them, say, ‘natural=dry_swamp’??? 
> There are ~ 4,000 of these ‘natural=mud’ mapped so far that are in fact ‘dry swamps’. Note that the tag natural=mud  wiki says “This tag should not be used for areas with intermittent water cover which are water covered or completely dry most of the time.” So this tagging is incorrect as they are dry most of the time…  
> 
> There are more in existence but not mapped. 
> Sample https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/ <https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1143825454>1143851993 <https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1143851993>
> 
> Any thoughts? 
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