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Ever dealt with the aftermath of a Bleve?

I'm one of the founders of the World Waterfall Database, and this is very cool to see. We've tried to stay on top of the "major" websites that document waterfalls around the world, but I don't think we'd seen yours before, so this was a pleasant surprise to stumble across today. You've got some really nice pictures in there, very good for documentation. Couple questions for you:

1) What is your criteria for cataloging a waterfall? Do you have a baseline for height or stream volume / consistency, or is it more based off of mapping locations out? Do you include waterfalls that only flow when it's raining? I'm quite curious about this primarily because 3,000 waterfalls seems like an awfully high number for an island the size of Taiwan.

2) Would you at all be interested / willing to share your data with us so that we might fill the rather substantial black hole(s) in our information about the waterfalls of Taiwan? I unfortunately don't have infrastructure in place right now to allow that to be done easily, but I'm hoping to launch some crowdsourcing tools later this year so that industrious individuals such as yourself who would be willing to contribute may do so without us having to go through a very tedious process.

That shiner on your head is pretty gnarly too. May it be the first of many battlescars. I picked another one up on my shin last week in Oregon.

1) Unfortunately, I don't have a good system for this. I even wrote a Quora question about it a few months ago, but got no response. I don't know what makes a waterfall, there doesn't seem to be any official guidelines for naming an measuring by the US surveying bodies or any other organization. It's unclear to me when a waterfall becomes a 2nd tier or a separate waterfall.

Yeah, this is something we ran into a long time ago. There's never been any sort of accepted definition or standards as to what exactly qualifies and what doesn't. The USGS usually only names waterfalls after they've been locally named for a while, and in the past they were typically only mapped when they were encountered during surveys for other purposes (timber harvesting, road construction, etc). We're in the process of writing out a lengthy set of guidelines that we use and will make publicly available soon - it may not be official in any sort of capacity, but we are pretty knowledgeable on the subject, so hopefully we can create something that can be seen as legitimate at least based on experience, and can be adopted more broadly.

Waterfall tiers that are only a meter or so apart, that are obviously part of the same waterfall. But what if they are 10 meters, or 1000 meters? That's where it becomes unclear. Several named waterfalls here (with park-service managed trails) have higher tiers that are only 10-20 meters back which have different names. Conversely, several waterfalls also have higher tiers which are 20 minute hikes from the lower tiers, yet have the same name, and this might go on for 5-6 waterfalls.

For what it's worth, our criteria is: if there is more than 500 linear feet between two tiers, they should be considered separate waterfall, except when it's clear that both falls are formed as a result of the same cliff system. We have made exceptions to this rule on a case by case basis however, and one such exception would be in situations where two different drops are much closer together, but have a history of each being named independently.

For obscure waterfalls on my website, I tend to group tiers in the same river that can be hiked to in the same day into the same waterfall. If it's significantly far away, has a completely different entrance point, or they are both significantly large in their own right, to the point where you would visit them on different trips, I may separate them. I understand this is rather arbitrary, but I don't have a better method. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter.

Your decision here is understandable from the perspective of organizing your data for your website. I had originally thought about doing something similar a long time ago. As I eluded to earlier, we've given a lot of thought into how to qualify an individual waterfall, and our position on this type of scenario would be to consider each waterfall a separate entity in terms of documenting and cataloging it - again, so long as they are 500 feet or more apart, and are not formed by the same cliff system. I know that doesn't exactly sound crystal clear, I'm trying to figure out a good way to illustrate it for when we publish our guidelines.

I won't include a waterfall that flows ONLY if it's raining, but if it flows for 8 months then dries up for 4, that counts to me.

Agreed - there are world famous waterfalls which only flow for half of the year (or less in a few cases), so your logic here is entirely sound from where I stand.

I want to point out that there are thousands more waterfalls which are not counted or listed because that's just the nature of Taiwan. If you drive around in the mountains in August, everywhere you look there will be water running down the mountain. It would be very presumptuous to say that I've found 10% of the waterfalls, or maybe even 1%. I'm not sure what the total of the island is, but I'm it's probably over 50,000. I guess that may be why I went with waterfalls. There are just so many of them!

That sounds like a problem I'm familiar with, and one which we're running into when compiling data for New Zealand presently (it rains a lot, plus the steep mountains = lots and lots and lots of really short lived waterfalls). Its a good problem to have, in my not so unbiased opinion.

My height requirements vary a little. Generally it's 5 meters or up, but it's got to be interesting. At this Ocean God's pools there are several waterfalls around 3-4 meters, and a 6-7 meter side-stream waterfall and a few 20-30 meter smaller side waterfalls (low flow, aren't the main river), but the main attraction are the pools, so it's categorized as a waterfall on my website, but we don't talk about it as a waterfall. (The name in English and Chinese doesn't include "waterfall"). However, if someone asks me what's up the river passed the pools, I'll say it's a few small waterfalls. https://youtu.be/LB6K1nx9qpc

That's actually pretty in line with our requirements: 15 feet (4.5m) if it flows all year, 50 feet (15m) if it flows for up to 6 months, and 200 feet (60m) if it flows for less than 3 months (anything that doesn't flow consistently for 3 months is excluded unless historically named).

Awesome. This will definitely be helpful, really appreciate it.

What about measuring the height of a waterfall? That's also unclear to me. The water level of the pool changes all the time, and not all waterfalls are a classic drop. Did you come up with rules for measuring height as well? Sometimes where a waterfall starts and ends is pretty ambiguous. The rivers in Taiwan are so steep in places, I think it would be easy to classify entire 5km sections as one waterfall in many places, even if there are no major drops.

Where the top and bottom aren't clear is definitely where gray area comes into play. Generally that's something we play more by ear and feeling than anything else, but the primary factor there is along the lines of "is there a distinct change in the overall pitch of the stream at any point?" There have been few cases where using that train of thought doesn't net pretty solid results for us thus far - the area where this comes into question most so far has been in the high Sierra Nevada in California. This is a good example - what we refer to as Olmsted Cascade in Yosemite National Park in California (not officially named). It's a very gradual natural waterslide that initially is fairly steep, but then gets much more shallow as it extends downstream, but it doesn't stop sliding for quite some distance (it's about one-quarter of a mile long from top to bottom, and it has a total vertical drop of about 300 feet), but there are distinct top and bottom points as identified by the shift in the pitch of the creek at the top, and the pool at the bottom.

Your example of a 5km long section of river is definitely something to take into account. It would be highly implausible to class that whole thing as one waterfall, as it would be extremely unlikely that a river would be unbroken in any sort of visual way for that length. The key to take into account again is where are the distinct changes in the pitch of the river? If it has a fairly uniform grade through that whole 5km stretch, then it may not be viable to classify most (or all) of it as a waterfall because it's so uniform. We've encountered streams in areas of the world where they lose thousands and thousands of feet in elevation in a very short distance, but because there is no way to easily say "that point is the top and that point is the bottom" because it's so uniform, we err on the side of saying it shouldn't be classified as a waterfall. This however is still something we're ironing the kinks out of, so it's not a 100% golden rule by any means. Worst case scenario, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you can probably make a sound judgment as to what it is.

Even with rules, it doesn't seem to get any easier. The place I hit my head is a 15-20 meter tall waterslide going down at an average 30 degree angle (white water). Is it a waterfall? I'm not calling it one, but I could see how the argument could be made. What if it continued like that for 100 more meters?

Yep, that would be considered a waterfall by our standards as long as you can identify a distinct top and bottom. And if it continued for 100 meters, well see my previous example. Here's some video I found that shows an overview of the area; you'll notice it does get less steep after that initial ~100 foot drop, but it doesn't really "stop", it just keeps sliding and sliding and sliding until it hits the pool way further downstream, which is why it's considered all one drop in our book.