It's missing man made channels. Some natural waterways end in a channel which ends in another natural waterway. All of three should be connected but the channel in between breaks the connection and the channel is not marked on the map. Probably the first waterway ended up into another natural one before men made the channel, because water flows no matter what.
It sounds like either you're saying the website is missing a tag like waterway=ditch or you haven't seen the "include canals" button or so, but with an example it's probably easiest to tell which. The underlying database probably has the data you're missing
It does not refer to canals but the effect is to also include them. Maybe all of them is too much but finding the only canal the merges two waterways could be difficult. No idea.
I was able to select waterway and canals and, in California, I was able to see prominent ones like the California aqueduct that runs from Tracy to LA and smaller ones like the south Folsom canal that runs from Lake Natoma to the former nuclear power plant Rancho Seco.
"Include canals" does not seem to distinguish between canals that have replaced natural drainage channels, and those that connect different watersheds - which may or may not be what you want. This is noticeable, for example, in the English midlands, where the major watersheds merge into one connected entity (maybe because of the network of pre-railroad navigation canals?)
Interesting to be able to see many waterways being extremely tightly wound and others straightforward over long distances. I wonder if it's an issue of data resolution or actual geography.
That's beautiful. I'm impressed we can compute related components on a world map so fast. The interconnections everywhere are beautiful. If this data is reliable, you can go from west europe to east china with just 3 changes (largely helped by canals)
It makes me want to make a remotely (4G) controllable solar-powered tiny boat, and see how far I can drive it, though this map lacks the unreachable discontinuities (dam)
I'm the creator of this. Yes, it's precomputed on a computer, but it only takes ~30 mins to calculate each view. Most of that time is file I/O (which I really need to refactor)
It does have some problems. The upper McKenzie River in Oregon is shown as separate drainage since there is a break in the river. There are multiple sections in that area that are separate. Bigger one is that the Columbia River is split at McNary Dam.
I'm not sure what needs to be fixed in OSM.
Maybe it needs to detect dams. Or rivers that don't end in the ocean or endoheric lake.
(I'm the creator of this) Yes lots of rivers are missing those sort of connections through lakesᵉᵗᶜ, but that's not unique to USA. Please keep mapping to fix up things.
(I'm the creator). There's a few views which will bring in _named_ streams, the `waterway` & `name` tag views. I tried to calculate it with any waterway tag, which would include unnamed streams, but my computer ran out of memory. Maybe later.
In the American southwest, the map shows a dense network of waterways around Farmington NM, and extending roughly 100 miles E-W and 150 miles N-S, and a similar but smaller region between the Colorado river and the four corners. I would guess that this is an artifact of mapping, as the area is pretty arid, and perhaps a consequence of these being largely Navajo, Apache and Ute lands.
Hi! I'm the creator of this tool! I'm open to more feedback, and suggestions. Even related views.
Lots of people discovering OSM through this, which is great. This sort of tool is new, so we're all just fixing up lots of little tagging & topology mistakes which were hard to spot.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadIt sounds like either you're saying the website is missing a tag like waterway=ditch or you haven't seen the "include canals" button or so, but with an example it's probably easiest to tell which. The underlying database probably has the data you're missing
The first one is "only waterway=river"
The second one is "with waterway & name"
It does not refer to canals but the effect is to also include them. Maybe all of them is too much but finding the only canal the merges two waterways could be difficult. No idea.
It makes me want to make a remotely (4G) controllable solar-powered tiny boat, and see how far I can drive it, though this map lacks the unreachable discontinuities (dam)
It could be and likely is pre-computed on server side.
follow me on fedi/masto for more news: <https://en.osm.town/@amapanda/>
I'm not sure what needs to be fixed in OSM.
Maybe it needs to detect dams. Or rivers that don't end in the ocean or endoheric lake.
Edit: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rivers Explains it quite well with some graphics.
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-river-basins-websi...
Lots of people discovering OSM through this, which is great. This sort of tool is new, so we're all just fixing up lots of little tagging & topology mistakes which were hard to spot.
follow me on fedi/masto for more news: <https://en.osm.town/@amapanda/>