Vanuatu Waterways: OpenStreetMap Hydrological Data with Bislama Names

Vanuatu hydrological features exported from OpenStreetMap by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) as of March 2026. The data captures rivers, wetlands, and bays across the archipelago in four standard geospatial formats. It includes physical attributes and multilingual naming conventions for water bodies.

Use Cases

• Hydrological modeling using 'waterway' and 'natural' tags to map drainage basins
• Infrastructure assessment by identifying 'blockage' or 'tunnel' attributes in river networks
• Linguistic mapping of geographic features using 'name:en', 'name:fr', and 'name:bis' columns

Strengths

• Multilingual name support including Bislama (name:bis)
• Available in four standard GIS formats: SHP, GeoJSON, GeoPackage, and KML
• Includes specific infrastructure tags such as 'blockage', 'tunnel', and 'covered'

Limitations

• Crowdsourced data subject to varying levels of precision and completeness
• Physical dimensions like 'width' and 'depth' are often sparsely populated in OSM exports

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap contributors

Collection Method

Crowdsourced geospatial data exported via the HOT HDX pipeline

Freshness

Updated as of March 2026.

Geography

Vanuatu