Book Image

Learning QGIS - Third Edition

By : Anita Graser
Book Image

Learning QGIS - Third Edition

By: Anita Graser

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly open source geographic information system (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The popularity of open source geographic information systems and QGIS in particular has been growing rapidly over the last few years. Learning QGIS Third Edition is a practical, hands-on guide updated for QGIS 2.14 that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. Through clear, practical exercises, this book will introduce you to working with QGIS quickly and painlessly. This book takes you from installing and configuring QGIS to handling spatial data to creating great maps. You will learn how to load and visualize existing spatial data and create data from scratch. You will get to know important plugins, perform common geoprocessing and spatial analysis tasks and automate them with Processing. We will cover how to achieve great cartographic output and print maps. Finally, you will learn how to extend QGIS using Python and even create your own plugin.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Learning QGIS Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Vector and raster analysis with Processing


The most comprehensive set of spatial analysis tools is accessible via the Processing plugin, which we can enable in the Plugin Manager. When this plugin is enabled, we find a Processing menu, where we can activate the Toolbox, as shown in the following screenshot. In the toolbox, it is easy to find spatial analysis tools by their name thanks to the dynamic Search box at the top. This makes finding tools in the toolbox easier than in the Vector or Raster menu. Another advantage of getting accustomed to the Processing tools is that they can be automated in Python and in geoprocessing models.

In the following sections, we will cover a selection of the available geoprocessing tools and see how we can use the modeler to automate our tasks.

Finding nearest neighbors

Finding nearest neighbors, for example, the airport nearest to a populated place, is a common task in geoprocessing. To find the nearest neighbor and create connections between input features...