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I would like to extract all the data that is coloured blue (water) from OSM for England.

I'm doing this as I need a poylgon of the extents of inland waterways (Ordnance Survey don't hold this data).

Is there a way I can do this? I don't know where to start!

MrXsquared
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Phoebe
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  • Why would you like to extract vectors from OSM rasters instead of using native OSM vectors directly? – user30184 Nov 10 '21 at 12:04
  • I didn't know this could be done- would I be able to extract waterbody polygons? How would I go about doing this? – Phoebe Nov 10 '21 at 12:05
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    There are many alternatives. You can download OSM data files for example from geofabrik.de, or use some service, like https://overpass-turbo.eu/. – user30184 Nov 10 '21 at 12:16
  • It seems like I cannot extract vectors for free from geofabrik, and I am unsure how to use overpass-turbo.eu, what kind of query would I need to run to select the data I want to extract? – Phoebe Nov 10 '21 at 12:29
  • Certainly you can extract vectors for free from https://download.geofabrik.de/. When it comes to overpass turbo, try if the Help button on the site has some useful information. This site should be worth having a look as well https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Language_Guide. – user30184 Nov 10 '21 at 12:34
  • Thanks! I've gone through the geofabrik free options, but it only covers larger rivers, I'd need data for brooks and streams too. While these are marked on OSM, they aren't downloadable. This is why I was looking to extract from the raster- is this doable? – Phoebe Nov 10 '21 at 13:06
  • Downloads in osm.pbf format contain all data that exists from that area in the OSM database. I guess that you downloaded the shapefiles. – user30184 Nov 10 '21 at 13:49

2 Answers2

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As mentioned in the comments the best way to extract all waterways:

  1. Download your Region from geofabrik
  2. Convert the pbf into a sqlite database described here for example: ogr2ogr -f SQLite saarland-latest.sqlite saarland-latest.osm.pbf
  3. Import the database into QGIS (select only lines) enter image description here
  4. Apply a Provider Feature Filter (Properties --> Source --> Provider Feature Filter) with the following query: "waterway" IS NOT NULL enter image description here
  5. Result should look like this: enter image description here
Bernd Loigge
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  • Thank you, I have the line data already, I need polygons of the waterways unfortunately, will this method work for that? – Phoebe Nov 11 '21 at 14:11
  • Waterways can have an additional but not mandatory width tag which is an approximate average width of the river throughout most of length of that bit of river. So I guess using the vector data from OSM is nothing you can use here as I am not aware of any polygons which describe waterways. You could create a buffer around the lines using the width tag (if available) and a default value (if not available). – Bernd Loigge Nov 11 '21 at 14:34
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https://extract.bbbike.org/

Try this website. This is a cool way, where you can select the area and extract places you want. You need to provide the tag of the OpenStreetMap symbol.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Carto/Symbols

Assuming, that you have QGIS...

The QuickOSM plugin will help you with the issue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxkh2f-3Bj8&ab_channel=PhilipWhite

Geographos
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