Book Image

Hands-On Geospatial Analysis with R and QGIS

By : Shammunul Islam, Brad Hamson
Book Image

Hands-On Geospatial Analysis with R and QGIS

By: Shammunul Islam, Brad Hamson

Overview of this book

Managing spatial data has always been challenging and it's getting more complex as the size of data increases. Spatial data is actually big data and you need different tools and techniques to work your way around to model and create different workflows. R and QGIS have powerful features that can make this job easier. This book is your companion for applying machine learning algorithms on GIS and remote sensing data. You’ll start by gaining an understanding of the nature of spatial data and installing R and QGIS. Then, you’ll learn how to use different R packages to import, export, and visualize data, before doing the same in QGIS. Screenshots are included to ease your understanding. Moving on, you’ll learn about different aspects of managing and analyzing spatial data, before diving into advanced topics. You’ll create powerful data visualizations using ggplot2, ggmap, raster, and other packages of R. You’ll learn how to use QGIS 3.2.2 to visualize and manage (create, edit, and format) spatial data. Different types of spatial analysis are also covered using R. Finally, you’ll work with landslide data from Bangladesh to create a landslide susceptibility map using different machine learning algorithms. By reading this book, you’ll transition from being a beginner to an intermediate user of GIS and remote sensing data in no time.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
8
GRASS, Graphical Modelers, and Web Mapping

Working with vector data in QGIS

Now, let's have a look at how we can use QGIS for vector data management. Doing spatial data management in QGIS is not complicated and, once you master it, it's actually enjoyable to perform in QGIS. We'll learn about merging shapefiles, converting polygons into lines and vice versa, clipping, working with difference, buffers, working with intersection, statistical summaries of vector layers, using field calculators, and more.

Combining shapefiles

In many cases, we need to combine multiple shapefiles, for example, when we need to merge the shapefiles of two contiguous areas. We'll merge two contiguous districts in Bangladesh, Dhaka, and Gazipur. We have shapefiles for both...