On 12/2/23 11:13, stevea wrote:
On Feb 11, 2023, at 3:53 PM, Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefi...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 12 Feb 2023 at 05:10, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> 
wrote:
A wetland is a land area that is saturated with water, either permanently or 
seasonallyā€¯

But does "seasonally" include "maybe once every 20 years"?
Climate change (being real, humans on Earth do experience climate change right now) makes words like 
"intermittent" (to describe stream flow) and "seasonally" (about whether a wetland or 
playa has surface water, possibly over dusty, sandy, "soil" or raw earth annually or occasionally 
or almost-perpetually-but-not-always...) pretty goopy (wet, plastic, runny...) themselves.  Assumptions 
change, words defined in one era become less precise over years.  This is normal language evolution, btw.  
Sometimes years and decades, sometimes many centuries.  I find it interesting how climate change does this, 
and it does.

In short:  it's hard to say what words about "changing, yet often predictable cycles of weather" 
mean when we're in the midst of changes about what "weather" means.  It might seem like 
"doomed to failure" here, but languages adjust, sometimes in poetic, beautiful ways.  And what is 
tagging but another language?


OSM maps what is here now. And these 'dry swamps' exist here and now.

What OSM wetlands evolve into in the future is a problem for the future of OSM and not something to waste time over now.



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