Missing Estuaries in Coastline Data (e.g., Amazon Estuary)

[fbriol]

Hello,

We are working on building a high-resolution land/sea/ocean mask using shapefiles from osmdata. The data has been incredibly useful; however, we’ve noticed that estuaries are missing from the coastline data—for example, the Amazon estuary.

This omission affects the accuracy of our project, as estuaries are significant geographical features that should be included in the coastline. Is it possible to include estuaries in the coastline data provided by osmdata? We are willing to assist by modifying the coastline generation process to incorporate these areas if needed.

For reference, here’s an Overpass API query that illustrates the issue in the Amazon estuary region:

// Fetch all natural water bodies within the bounding box
[out:xml][timeout:25];
(
  way
    ["maritime"="yes"]
    ["natural"="water"]
    (-2.5,-52.0,0.5,-48.0);
  relation
    ["maritime"="yes"]
    ["natural"="water"]
    (-2.5,-52.0,0.5,-48.0);
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

We believe that including estuaries would enhance the dataset’s completeness and utility for many users.

Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to your response and are ready to collaborate on this.

Best regards,

Frederic.

[joto]

The coastlines as they are processed here don't take anything into account but the ways tagged as natural=coastline in OSM. That is on purpose. This data needs special processing and that's what we are doing here.

This data should include the estuaries but unfortunately more and more people mess up the OSM data and pretend the estuaries and bays are "inland water" when they are clearly not. Misusing the tags for inland water and then adding a maritime=yes to it is still, in my opinion, wrong tagging. That data should be fixed in OSM and then this processing will work as intended. Unfortunately this seems to be an uphill battle.

Anyway: The long and short of it is that the goal for this data is to do the special processing for the natural=coastline ways only. We don't have the resources to do any other kind of processing or provide and maintain the services for it. Feel free to set up your own processing using the coastline processing tools plus any other stuff you want to do and offer that to the public.