Digitizing shapefile QGIS

hello and welcome my name is Monica new I'm the GIS manager at Conservation International and today I will show you how to create your own polygon shapefile using QGIS now you should have already downloaded QGIS on your machine using another tutorial linked in the comments here if you have not and then right when you open it up it'll look similar to this if it does not have the same toolbars you can go ahead and right-click if you're using a Windows on one of the panels and you'll have this panels and toolbars option open up now what you're seeing here that will be useful today is the layers panel the digitizing toolbar tool toolbar the manage layers toolbar and the map navigation toolbar so please ensure these are all clicked on so that you can view the same toolbars and panels that I'm using the next thing you'll want to do is go to the plugins option at the top and select manage and install plugins this is how you download any plugins that are available freely in QGIS today I'm going to use the open layers plug-in you can search in the toolbar find your plug-in and hit install once it's done a little message will appear and it'll say it's been installed successfully as you see here at the top to access the open layers plug-in you can click on web and select from a series of available base Maps now what I want to look at is this being Arial it's a nice base map it does give you a message that says you can't use this for exporting Maps but since we're not doing that today it's perfectly fine and then you can click on these plus and minus icons in the map navigation toolbar and I'm just going to zoom into an area here since I know exactly what area I'm looking at I'm going to look at these communities near the Bain Railly wetlands in Zambia this looks like a pretty I want to move using this hand icon the pan hand and move it so I can see the communities I want to look at and digitize in my polygon then I'll go over here to this manage layers toolbar and I will select new shape file there so when it opens up they'll have this window and you cannot select from different types so you have point line and polygon like I said earlier I'm going to make a polygon today this is the coordinate system this is WGS 1984 it's a geographic coordinate system and I'll just leave that today because that's a good coordinate system once i've create my polygons i can decide to project into a new projected coordinate system if I so choose and give it a name it only has ten characters so you have to be conscious of that and you can't use spaces because this is the shape file so just enter something that will allow you to refer to that should you see it in your layers panel layer later select ok it'll open up so navigate to where you want to save that I'm gonna save it in a folder called Zambia I'm going to say the full name here and give it a descriptive name select save now you can see this title that you've given it has appeared in the layers panel now what I want to do is actually draw the polygon so you click on this little pencil looking icon and it should show up to the layer that you're digitizing next I need to select add feature because I'm adding a polygon this is the add polygon and I can go through and select all of the areas around the communities I want to look at when you're done right click and then it'll allow you to select I'll say that's one now if I want to create another polygon I can also go ahead and say okay I want to look at these communities right click to these IDs need to be unique and you can do that repeatedly until you have the polygons of your choice now here I want to save that so I've saved that layer it's safe to wear I've navigated to before and if I want I can say okay this is great I'm finished and I've completed my task for the day however let's say I would like to see what's underneath right now these are not clear what's actually underneath the polygons or Paik so I can go right click on the layer and select properties now with the properties window it may show up in a different area make sure you can see it in your your window you can select the fill so right now it's a simple fill it's this color green and it's solid color but if you select no brush it will be transparent so I can zoom in and say okay am I missing anything here let's say I wanted to include these communities but I did a very good job when I was digitizing but what I can do I can select this node tool and click near one of the nodes this allows you to actually move those boundaries so let's say oh I want to get these communities to I can look around let me save that hand around make sure I'm happy with this looks like I've done a decent job maybe I'll move this one as well get those small villages there this is a little bit far out doesn't look like there's any development there let's just go to there so now I the save button so now once I've saved I can open the folder where I've saved that shape file we see that shape files there when I go ahead and close QGIS I'm not going to save this because I don't need that map extent anymore but you can save it as a project if you like if you want to refer back to that same base map and shape file later now you can see I have series of full files that all help make up a shape file if any of these are missing your shape file will not work in arcgis for desktop or QGIS or other spatial softwares so what i want to do if i want to share this shapefile with somebody else so i want to select all of the files and just do send to compressed zipped folder now i have a compressed zipped folder it's only take two kb and i can send that very easily in an email that's all for today thank you for watching

Channel: TrendsEarth Toolbox

Views: 68,311

Keywords: QGIS, digitize, save, polygon, shapefile

Id: Zer558SnKX4

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2018