I hope that this discussion and the related proposal wiki page will lead to a solution, because I found several times, mapping in Africa with HOT projects, "desertic lands" and I didn't find a tag for this.
If we search the Internet for "barren soil", we can find a lot of ground-level related images. And I think that we could map such characteristic even with only imagery (without direct survey), because it's a "macro" feature, as is a wood or a scrub. Maybe images was shot in a particular season, and the soil condition is not always the same? Well, if I check several imageries and in all of them I see a "desertic land", I'm confident I can map that area with the tag we're talking about. And I think it doesn't matter if for few days a year (or few days in several years...) it will rain and there will be - for few days - a bit of vegetation: it's not an OSM mapping rule, to map the "main" characteristic of an item? Surely it could be useful if botanists and/or geologists could better specify (with more specific tags) the cause: no rain? pollution? specific ground-conditions such as presence of salt or sulfur? For the main tag, I think that "natural" is the right key (being already natural=sand/bare_rock/shingle/scree...). About the value, I'd prefer a botanic or geologist suggest us the best word. Some references: - "Barren vegetation" [1] (..."Regions on the earth’s surface where soils are dominating the ecosystems with little to no plant cover are often referred to as “Barren”. ) - "Barren land" [2] (an old web page from NASA: "...ecosystems in which less than one third of the area has vegetation or other cover. In general, Barren Land has thin soil, sand, or rocks."). This web page cites "A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data", a free paper you can find in Google Books too. - "Barren soil is starving Africans" [3] Other examples of "desertic" lands: - Bonneville (USA) [4] (maybe some of you saw World's Fastest Indian, the lovely movie with Anthony Hopkins :-) ) - La Leona (Patagonia) [5] Ciao! Marco (mbranco2 / UNGSC-mbranco2) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barren_vegetation [2] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/iwgsdi/Barren_Land.html [3] https://www.nature.com/news/2006/060327/full/060327-15.html [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats [5] https://visitpatagonia.com.ar/en/activities/petrified-forest-la-leona/ <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Mail priva di virus. www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
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