Environmental QGIS Training - Exercise 1: Intro to QGIS

[Music] hi I'm Tracy from guy resources and I'll be taking you through exercise 1 qgs is an open source geographic information system or GIS that allows people to make maps and view various forms of geographic information during the course you will learn tasks to import interrogate edit create visualize geo process and export data in this video we'll be focusing on familiarizing you with kuja's and the basics such as how to save your data correctly add data and so on if you're already familiar with QGIS you may wish to skip ahead to the folder structure or even move ahead to the next video you may notice there are two types of QGIS applications installed on your machine the QGIS browser lets you look at a data set while QGIS desktop allows you to manipulate and map data sets this is the one we'll be using open the QGIS desktop program we're using version 2.1 eight workspaces are a placeholder for your data they allow you to visualize color label filter and modify the data held within them QGIS comes with a variety of tools to analyze process and review your data your workspace is customizable so it may look a little different to mine at the top we have the menu bar which contains your workspace properties settings tools plugins and other details about your workspace below this and down the left of the toolbars which contain a bunch of icons for different commands if you hover over buttons in the menu and toolbars you'll get a preview of what they are these can be added and removed as required so your icons may look a little different to mine this top window is your file browser and below that is your layers panel which is a table of contents for the layers within your project it's empty right now but as we add to the project it will fill up this large window here is your map canvas down the bottom we have the info bar which shows information about the current map extents shown in the map canvas here you've got the exact coordinates of your cursor if you move your cursor around you'll see that these change then you've got your scale magnifier rotation and coordinate reference system this is an important one and we've talked about it more in a prerequisite video we've given you a bunch of data for this training in a photo code training documents and if you look at your pre created photos you'll see that they're called zero one training data and zero two training outputs and within these are a bunch of subfolders to keep our data organized click on project save as in the menu bar navigate to training outputs workspaces give the workspace a name we'll call this exercise one and click Save click the add vector layer icon under source click browse this will take you to your file explorer open the folder 0 1 training data remember this is the folder we've setup to store all of your input data open 0 1 shape files we've put a folder in here called Bremer Bay which is a series of data sets in it in File Explorer your folders click on the drop down list on the bottom right hand side this gives a list of all available format options qgs can read select ESRI shapefiles SHP select 5 0 1 to mainland's SHP and click open the layer will appear in the table of contents and its visual representation in the map canvas on the right you can turn it on and off by checking this box if you can't see the layer in the map canvas just make sure that this box is checked if you still can't see it right-click the 5:01 to mainland's SHP layer and click zoom to layer cue just randomly assigns colors till the layers you add so your data may look different to mine you can change the way each layer looks more on that later if we go to our file explorer you'll see each shapefile has for extensions shapefiles can comprise up to 15 individual files but these are the most common we use the dot SHP file in QGIS which is the features geometry then you have dot DB F which is the features attributes dot P RJ it's projection and dot s BN s B X or s HX which are the spatial indexes next we're going to add some more layers to our workspace go to layout add layer add vector layer or use the icon in the toolbar under source click browse which takes you to your file explorer so let's go into that brim of a folder data shape files Bremer Bay now hold your ctrl key and click the following make sure you select the ones with dot SHP extensions Islands Lakes native vegetation areas populated places reserves and roads and click open and open again all those layers will appear in your table of contents and should all be turned on you can play around with the layer order by clicking on a layer and dragging it up or down then releasing now we can only see the mainland layer because it's covering everything else so let's reorder our layers as follows populated places on top then reserves native vegetation areas roads lakes pylons and mainland's next we're going to look at metadata this is information about the layer and it helps us understand where the layer came from when it was created and modified what methods were used to generate it who created it and who to talk to for more information metadata can give you a better understanding of how useful it might be for your work or if it's the most up-to-date version of that data it also comes in many different formats such as text or XML files our Bremer Bay data is from Geoscience Australia if you go to your file explorer under the brim of a folder there's a metadata folder open the GE a PDF and have a bit of a read of appendix D metadata and see if you can find the data currency beginning date pause the video here if you need to you did you find it okay back to kuja's metadata can also be stored within the data right click on a layer and click properties then find the metadata tab our data is from Geoscience Australia and they have a separate metadata document which you just read so there's not much info in here other than the automated data but many layers will store very useful information in here click cancel ok let's rename our layers to something more useful to us right click your layer and click rename we're going to rename the populated places layer 2 towns we'll give these other layers some simplified names to note that changing the names of the layers only changes them in this workspace your original vector files will keep their shape file name if you hover over the layer in the table of contents and we'll show you its folder directory and you can see the original name is retained raster layers can represent a number of useful features such as satellite imagery elevation temperature and so on their grids where each cell has a common variable for example you may have a raster layer showing groundwater depth and each cell will have a value for that attribute images and rust-eze can be added to your workspace if they're geo-referenced meaning their extents are referenced spatially to add a raster layer click on this icon or go to layers add layers and raster layer we're going to navigate to our data folder once again then go to images and select this file here which is an image showing the topography of Australia move it above your other layers in the table of contents and make sure it's turned on in this tool bar you've got a bunch of icons which you can use to move around your map you've got your pan button for clicking and dragging the map zoom in zoom out and so forth you can use a mouse wheel to zoom in and out which is faster than clicking on the icons each time this icon zooms out to the full extent of the map this are concerns back to your last extent which is really handy for the next few exercises we won't be using the topographic raster layer so let's deactivate it to speed things up a bit we can add extra functionality to queue just by adding plugins which are extensions of the core product one useful plug-in is open layers which allows you to view online imagery like street maps and satellite imagery we're going to add that now in the menu bar click on plugins manage and install plugins under the install tab review which plugins you already have sometimes this comes pre-installed so just ensure it's checked but if not click on the all tab search for the plug-in called open layers plug-in and select it click install plug-in and click close now you can use this plug-in to add Google Maps as a layer to your table of contents click web hover over open layers plug-in and you'll get a list of options hover over Google Maps and select a Google satellite drag this above the islands layer this may take a while to load depending on your internet connection you can now see some of your layers on top of the google satellite imagery have a play with this and zoom in on an area of interest once you've had a play we're going to remove it as we don't need it for this project to remove a layer just right-click on it and select remove then okay just as a side note if you ever start a project and go to add open layers imagery and you get an error message add a vector layer first then your open layer then right click on your vector layer and click zoom to layer the info bar at the bottom of your workspace shows your general information and offers some tools for your workspace these include the coordinate location of your cursor the scale of your data in the map canvas the magnifier tool to zoom in statically the rotation tool to rotate your map view and the workspace CRS ID if the CRS is grayed out you don't have enabled on the fly CRS transformation activated you can change the CRS ID from here using this icon so if you hover over the brim of a town site you'll see the coordinates of the site in the info bar are these in lat/long or easting and northing if you click on the scale arrow you'll see a range of scale drop down values the one represents the map canvas and the larger number is reality so one to 1000 means one unit on the map canvas is 1000 units in reality what scale from the drop-down list allows you to zoom in closest to the data you [Music] remember the larger number represents units in real life if we select one to 500,000 one unit on the map now represents 500,000 units in real life so you're squeezing more Geographic extent into one unit in other words you zoomed out further to check which CRS your daughter is in right-click the layer and go to properties then general you'll find the CRS information listed here under coordinate reference system your workspace also has a CRS which you can find by clicking project project properties CRS and here's your project CRS down the bottom at the top of the page there's a checkbox named enable on-the-fly crs transformation you want to make sure this is activated because it allows you to allocate a CRS for the workspace this means that any layer in your workspace with a different CRS will still overlay correctly now we want to make sure any new data we create is in the right CRS and to do this we need to format the workspace in the menu bar go to settings options CRS under default CRS for new projects ensure that automatically enable on the flavory projection if layers have a different CRS is checked ensure that prompt for CRS is selected this will give us the option of setting the CRS for any data instead of the workspace automatically selecting one for you click OK now since we've been viewing a Google imagery layer this often overrides all other projections and doesn't revert even after removing the layer if you look down in your info bar you'll see that the coordinates don't look like your typical lat/long values for the area we're working in once the imagery is removed we have to reset the workspace to the CRS that you're working in go to project project properties click the CRS tab type in the filter text box GDA 94 select the top result with epsg 4 2 8 3 and click OK your workspace will now show latitude and longitude coordinates in the info bar you can also set your own keyboard shortcuts click settings configure short cuts click the action you'd like to update click Change when input appears type the action you would like the shortcut to be such as old D and click close you can access additional help and information on the QGIS functions and tools by clicking on help help contents and searching for an issue huges has the option to render data over your various CPU cores which makes your data load faster since some of the data layers you work with could be very large and you may find yourself adding and removing data layers frequently it might make sense to set q just to render them in parallel to make the application more efficient to turn on this rendering option in your menu bar click settings options under rendering check render layers in parallel using many CPU cores and click OK save and close your workspace that's the end of exercise 1 hopefully you are now familiar with the QGIS workspace and basic functions head to exercise 2 to look at data structure and review thanks for watching

Channel: Gaia Resources

Views: 20,452

Keywords: QGIS, GIS, environment, spatial, NRM, natural resource management, QGIS training, GIS training

Id: kR9J55SWSeI

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 02 2018