A friend, who works in this area of research, pointed me to an easy to read article [1] on estuaries. According to the article there are five types of estuaries based on their geology, coastal plain, bar-built, deltas, tectonic and fjords. (Note I'm skipping the classification based on water circulation as I'm not sure it's appropriate for OSM.)
If we are going to tag estuaries then it makes sense to add in the geology classification system. Based on how NOAA classifies estuaries We should add to waterway=riverbank + riverbank=estuary + estuary=costal_plain|bar-built|delta|tectonic|fjord. The alternative would be to use waterway=estuary + estuary_geology=costal_plain|bar-built|delta|tectonic|fjord. This would conflict with the wiki article on tide channels [2]. From my reading of the definition of an estuary, it seems that the tide channel is actually part of the estuary. [1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/estuaries/estuaries01_whatis.html [2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway%3Dtidal_channel Best, Clifford -- @osm_washington www.snowandsnow.us OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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