Talk:Tag:natural=desert
Lack of definition and verifiability
The description mentions two criterias for this tag: the lack of vegetation and the aridity (lack of water). Both of them are not verifiable and this makes use of this tag rather counterproductive:
Vegetation
- the lack of vegetation in deserts in not absolute, on the contrary many of the areas currently using this tag contain significant vegetation. But there is no definition how much vegetation can exist in a desert.
- there are already verifiable and well established tags for areas lacking vegetation, namely natural=sand, natural=scree and natural=bare_rock.
- in many area with sparse vegetation visibility of the vegetation varies strongly with season which makes verification be the mapper difficult even if there was a clear definition of the amount of vegetation in deserts.
Aridity
- aridity by definition is something that can only be verified by long term statistical observation and even then only with very limited spatial resolution.
- there is no clear established definition of what a desert is even if climate conditions are precisely known - see [1]
This lack of definition is also visible in the data - most of the desert areas have very crude outlines due to the lack of basis for a clear edge position. Where there are articulated outlines these rarely define the edge of the desert as a natural form but are edges of settlements, edges of sand covered areas as opposed to rock deserts etc.
--Imagico (talk) 11:20, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
It has been used heavily in Nevada and Utah to describe visibly flat areas that appear completely barren and hard-pack: the Bonneville Salt Flats and many parts of Nevada. "Desert" isn't the best term, but it seems consistently used in this area. In northern Africa there area visibly hard-pack/salt flat areas with interspersed sand dunes that have been tagged with Desert as well. Hard-pack / salt flats seems consistently used across the globe. Sytys (talk) 12:50, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
More specific than "hard-pack" is "large flat barren land surfaces". Sytys (talk) 13:00, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
Widely Misused
If the intent with natural=desert is to map dry lakes, playas, and salt pans, then tagging that is more specific to those features would be more appropriate. I would support a proposal for more specific tagging for these features, but natural=desert is not it.
Contrary to the stated intent, the natural=desert has been misused to map large areas of Nevada, Southern California, and parts of Utah and Arizona. With very few exceptions, the areas tagged with natural=desert are not barren land without vegetation. Certainly water is sparse in these areas, but they are generally better categorized as desert scrub (i.e., natural=scrub) because they have extensive communities of plant life. Also with very few exceptions, these areas are not "salt pans, dry lake-beds, and other large, flat, barren land surfaces." In the rare cases where they are, a more specific tag for these features would be better.