render natural=desert

[abdullahO2]

Make rendering of areas tagged with:
natural=desert + surface=sand
(natural=desert is not currently rendered)
Like areas tagged with:
natural=sand

[imagico]

We have deliberately removed rendering of natural=desert in #1200, see also #773.

In general in landcover rendering we concentrate on locally verifiable tags (like natural=sand, natural=bare_rock etc.).

The natural=desert tag has for a long time been recognized as a vague, poorly defined and non-verifiable tag - see
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:natural%3Ddesert for some explanation. And its use is accordingly fairly inconsistent.

We also as a principle do not like to conflate several semantically very different tags in a common rendering. Difference in appearance in the map should reflect differences in meaning for the target map user.

Personally i would very much like to see this style adopting more differentiated depiction of landcover and landforms in arid regions and/or with no or very sparse vegetation. But so far unfortunately no tagging has found broad and sufficiently consistent use to be considered for this here.

[abdullahO2]

These suggested features I think are appropriate:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Deserts
I suspect that the reason these tags are not being used is because most of the editors on OSM do not live in desert countries like Arab countries.

[abdullahO2]

The tags natural=desert and desert=erg I think largely describe sandy desert areas

[imagico]

I have explained already why the tag natural=desert is poorly defined and not consistently used. This failure of the tag has nothing to do with the distribution of active mappers in OSM. It failed not because of the lack of use but because of inconsistent use.

What has to do with the distribution of active mappers in OSM is that mapping of sand areas on a larger scale started and became more widespread much later than typical temperate zone landcover tags and is still largely less detailed. But it is getting there - natural=sand has 500k uses now - and that includes many of the large sand desert areas of this planet. We do what we can by rendering natural=sand and other bare ground landcover tags (specifically natural=bare_rock - 700k uses and natural=scree - 220k uses) that are well established and as said i would very much like to see us adding more meaningful tags for unvegetated or sparsely vegetated ground with well defined meanings and consistent use. Unfortunately so far nothing in that direction seems to be forthcoming. natural=dune has increased quite a bit in use - most of it through imported nodes - but there is also some manual mapping with linear ways and polygons. It would be important to properly document this practice, in particular establish some convention on the orientation of linear mapping (w.r.t. wind direction). The desert proposal also contains some other promising ideas - like tagging dune covered areas with tags documenting the type of dunes present (the natural=dunesea + dunesea=* concept) without the need to map the individual dunes and establishing a tagging for saltpans/playas. Such tagging ideas would need to be established in practical use and properly documented in how they are used. And this is indeed something where the contributions of those living in areas where such features are common are very important.

desert=erg has 83 uses and is used both in combination with natural=desert and natural=sand and has no documentation on the wiki. It is unclear if this is used in a way that is more than a synonym for natural=sand.

[abdullahO2]

Thank you and accept my regards and appreciation

[imagico]

Closing as we previously deliberately removed rendering of natural=desert and the tag is generally considered poorly defined and non-verifiable. Further development of tagging arid region physical geography, specifically dunes and dune-fields, would definitely be desirable and if established could be considered for rendering here.