Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By : Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP
Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By: Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP

Overview of this book

QGIS is an open source solution to GIS. It is widely used by GIS professionals all over the world. It is the leading alternative to the proprietary GIS software. Although QGIS is described as intuitive, it is also by default complex. Knowing which tools to use and how to apply them is essential to producing valuable deliverables on time. Starting with a refresher on the QGIS basics, this book will take you all the way through to creating your first custom QGIS plugin. From the refresher, we will recap how to create, populate, and manage a spatial database. You’ll also walk through styling GIS data, from creating custom symbols and color ramps to using blending modes. In the next section, you will discover how to prepare vector, heat maps, and create live layer effects, labeling, and raster data for processing. You’ll also discover advanced data creation and editing techniques. The last third of the book covers the more technical aspects of QGIS such as using LAStools and GRASS GIS’s integration with the Processing Toolbox, how to automate workflows with batch processing, and how to create graphical models. Finally, you will see how to create and run Python data processing scripts and write your own QGIS plugin with pyqgis. By the end of the book, you will understand how to work with all the aspects of QGIS, and will be ready to use it for any type of GIS work.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering QGIS - Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring the modeler and naming a model


Before starting a model, it is a good practice to configure the modeler. Models are saved as JSON files with a .model extension. When you save a model, QGIS will prompt you to save the model file to the Models folder. You can set the location of the Models folder by navigating to Processing | Options in QGIS Desktop. Under the Models section of the Processing options window, you can specify the location of the Models folder. Click on the default folder path and the browse (ellipses) button will appear, allowing you to select a different location:

To demonstrate the basics of using the graphical modeler, we will use a simple example that identifies riparian tree stands in Alaska. It will have three inputs and two algorithms. First, we will give our model a name and a group name. For this example, as shown in the following screenshot, we have opened the graphical modeler and named the model as Riparian Trees and the model group as Landcover. This is...