QGIS 3.10 BASICS - Lesson 4 - Formatting and labelling

right our next lesson is all about formatting and labeling we're going to look at an actual proper kind of site map the first thing I am going to have to do is actually create that map and then we're going to format it using fit on symbols and produce something that looks like a an actual phase one map for a site so yes let's get UJS open again I'm gonna create some new layers firstly I'm going to create is a polygon layer for the site boundary I'm not gonna give that any attributes because it's just going to be a single polygon with a red line that's okay kind of we don't want that as part of the group let's just shut down that group a new layer for habitats again don't just name it here you want to open this up not on top form we're spelling today this is gonna be habitats again it's gonna be polygons I'm gonna have phase 1 habitat code as text data I'm gonna add that to the field we're gonna just stick an area as a potential bonus as well that's gonna be a decimal number that's good enough polygons we also want a new layer for point habitats like scattered trees your point Oh a hub type state and another one for lines as well I realized it didn't really go into the creation of lines and points in the last video but they're pretty much the same as pretty much the same as polygons messed up with that last layer this is line habitats okay where did points go so this doesn't have a file path it's just got a file name so what we want to do with that is export two point habitats yep and then delete the original one which was the original one that the original one yeah that's the original one we'll just remove that because that's just a temporary layer right first job site boundary is this going to be red line side boundary so we want to have it transparent with a red line five pixels be enough we shall find out obviously we're just making this slight boundary up because this isn't a genuine site just use the extent of the park again using the whole holding down space to scroll working our way around the whole of the site boundary again because this is a demonstration I may be going a little bit quicker than a little less accurate than what I maybe would usually do so let's just imagine we messed up and put an extra point here and then we came in too close here I'm doing this is very exaggerated sometimes you do this in the middle of a shape and you go oh god and then you want to start from scratch again don't just continue on right click at the end then you can bring in the vert vertex editor tool do you know what we don't really need that point but we're gonna bring it back onto the line here we're gonna bring this one back up here as well and then that's our site boundary and we can finish editing that so what I usually do at this point is then take our habitats layer start editing and basically trace around our site boundary don't think it's set to all layers so we just need a few clicks on there on there you can see the area that it's creating so we know there's another vertex up here so we'll snap onto that and then that is the same area covered with habitats layer and then we can just start using the tools that have previously shown the fill tool and the split features to to start cutting our areas I'm not going because this is just a demonstration and it's not a real sitemap I'm going to be a little bit creative with some of these habitats and I'm gonna ignore things like footpaths because it would take a long time a lot longer than why I want to spend on this demonstration to actually draw those so I want to were using here I've stopped thinking for a second right so start outside come inside a little bit up they trace the outline here to this edge and then here right click and then that's separated that from the other area so we've got two there now we've got this area up here that's also suitable to be kind of sliced out in that way again I am just gonna ignore default popsie I've accidentally clicked over there but because this is the not a standard shape tool I want to cancel that it may get to a point where I just then start fast-forwarding in this part of the afternoon again that's this new Mouse yes blame the tools because I'm trying to press the middle button and I'm keep pressing the left button instead so let's forget that and just use the spacebar like you usually do again cutting out these areas I'm gonna basically finish with maybe four different habitat types here I'm gonna use woodland it's gonna be some areas of hard standing where did I start on this one I'll start outside good so all these that are on the edge they're suitable for this tool because they're not contained within a shape they're on the edge of a shape they have common boundaries again just going through this quite quickly it's not a press an exercise of precision that's everything we have on the edge so these areas now are gonna be suitable for the fill ring because it's fully contained within another feature who nearly snapped onto that other one that would have made it and not work ultimately because then it would be sharing a boundary in fact while I'm drawing these and I know I'm not going to be snapping on to anything it's a good idea to turns nothing off I'll get onto these habitats complex is in a minute where you've got multiple habitats within another habitat I'm gonna draw all the individual ones first because there's a couple of different ways you can approach them so I'll just stay with the fill ring and the habitats that are solely within another habitat imagine for some people this is as exciting as watching paint dry scan just left clicking to place your points right clicking finish your shape it's a clue this building I want to do something special with buildings obviously we're just working from the base map because I don't actually have any phase one site notes for this site one thing you could do would actually be to digitize your site north so you scan them into a image file and then actually do your reference your site notes on to here so then you could literally just trace around the areas that you've drawn in the field and actually compare those with say like an aerial image of the site as well see if you've got the habitat boundaries correct I'm gonna make this hard standing area here as well actually no we're not gonna do this because this is the tennis courts local knowledge that right to think these are the only habitats that we've got left so you can see that these here are touching so it's not a single habitat contained within another time Taft type it's kind of two habitats within so there's two options to deal with this you can either trace around all of the habitats complex and then cut it out so like split between the pond and the woodland actually let's just do that so again I'm just doing this very quickly the only thing that I want to avoid here is to touch any other edges so wouldn't want to accidentally snap on to somewhere like that so we basically draw around the habitats complex and then we can use the split features tool to do want to snap there though snap on to that it's not gonna be the right shape but again this is just the demonstration so that should now split these two so we have a separate pond from the woodland or the other option would be to use fill ring on one of these parts so to go out pond on its own not worrying about the islands within the ponds and then we are considering this is the shape that we want to split apart out of so we want to split this bit of woodland out of this larger yellow shape so if we start inside of the pond and just doing this very roughly very quickly because digitizing is you know ah yeah I would some because of snapped on here I'm just gonna finish at this point should have come along here at this leather but I've made a mistake thing so that's just right-click and now that's separated the pond from there so two options either you add everything as a habitat complex and then split the individuals or you can create the ring and then start splitting from the edge of that ring and I believe that is all about habitats now digitized so we're gonna save this so as I was saying before you can select multiple so if you hold down control you can so we're gonna call all of these areas woodland areas so we're gonna select them all I know these are not all woodland areas but for the purpose of this exercise to keep it a limited number of habitat types we are gonna call them all woodland areas missed one out there but that's not really important because that's not the purpose of this exercise so I mentioned earlier about adding attributes as a bulk process rather than typing the same each individual time so we go up here to the digitizing toolbar and we select to modify the attributes of all the selected features simultaneously select so area it's not area it's phase one code I'm just gonna use phase one text to be perfectly honest I'm not even going to use accurate ones I'm just gonna call it woodland woodland okay so if we now go into the attributes table for this open attribute table we can see that all of those features are now called woodland and the rest of them so you can order this by whatever you call them we have then all of these which have no habitat code we do want to give them a code so we've got that there and that our buildings so again do the same thing face 1 habitat cold building okay so that is hard standing that's also hard standing oh that's a pond so we've got ponds there so let's just do these in here that's just call it HS for hard standing that is all grassland it's a building we know that I'm standing so this is moving down because I've got this organized by Phase one habitat cold so as soon as this is given a value it moves down to the other hard standing parts this last part there is also pond and that I believe is all the habitats have now got a habitat type what I'm gonna do at this stage is also add some additional attributes to these things like ponds and buildings you may want a number for different reasons and you may also want to give them other attributes so dynamic let's create a building number much called buildin Oh am I not fit build no whole number yes so we've got this new attribute here now so we can call this building one call this building two we're also gonna save you may also if you've got things like ponds call that pond number okay so we've got the ponds here so pond number one number two you may want to give your woodland areas different numbers but I'm not gonna do that probably wouldn't want to do that Howard standing this is going to come into play with later on where when we actually do the formatting and adding label labels and actually because this is a building let's call this b1 b2 and call this p1 p2 because I did it is I I did it as a numerical shield only it'll only allow me to put numbers in here that's what I'm gonna do is delete build a number and pan number create these again but have them as text build no text length that's gonna be three at the most text right so building pick on so account you can fill these in as the attribute thingy pops up but if you especially if you're doing things on bulk sometimes doing it afterwards selecting the more might be the better way sometimes it's easier just to blast through the actual geo reference when part sorry not the geo referencing the digitizing part and then deal with the attributes afterwards it all depends on how complex your map is okay the reason things may have just started to look suddenly very different is because originally at this point I made some mistakes and I've had to backtrack a little bit partly because I didn't have some files prepared that I was going to need and polycast i'm just generally a bit of an idiot so let's pick up from where we left off which I believe we were in the attribute table which you will now see is lacking some values and has some additional habitat codes on the ends of the habitat descriptions mm-hmm so where were we we had just imported building numbers and pond numbers so other things that you may collect during your initial phase one habitat survey that you may want to display actually not really on phase one habitat survey you might have done a building inspection for bats at the same time as well so let's create and the field for bat potential these are all going to be related to some fancy formatting that's coming soon so bear with me that potential text string yep I'll have some of that and also maybe HS ice categories for your ponds as well so let's create get your site category number we're gonna use the actual wording word categories rather than the HSI value again this isn't training for those particular survey types this is just something that I'll help do some creative formatting in a bit so let's say we've got a low potential building and a high potential building and for our ponds we've got a good pond so that's all of the things that we've collected in the field maybe yep so one other thing you can do and I did create this field earlier but I decided to delete it no good reason for that actually but something you can calculate using the field calculator up here is the area for all these these different polygons which may be useful for things like if you're doing a briam assessment and you need to measure the areas or biodiversity net gain calculation again needing to measure areas so first thing we're gonna do is actually go into the project properties and look what units are so we're measuring distances in meters and areas in Hector's so if that's not what you want it to be then change it because if you update the option to change it from meters to Hector's then it won't update the attribute table he'll have to do the calculations again I swear it's my attribute table gone so this is going to be in Hector's so let's create a new field and call it area and it's in Hector's so we can put that there it's going to be a decimal number and the field calculator we're going to update the existing field which is area and it's a geometry function double-click on the area and then press ok and then that is now all of the areas in Hector's for all of these individual shape files you can export the attribute table into Excel so if you're wanting to do anything with those areas are not going to show you how to do that right now though maybe that's another video sometime so right we're finished with all of our creating of data so we're gonna stop editing and close that now so we have all these habitats individually individually created there's no overlaps there's no slithers all unique individual habitats so now we need to get some formatting on them to make them actually look look like a proper map so if we open the properties on the layer that you want to format so I may have said this earlier if you're doing anything like styling that involves the properties of a layer you're not editing the data within that layer the actual shapefile themselves we're editing how the project is deciding to style these layers so that's important to remember we're not if this isn't toggled for that layer then it's not an edit to that layer it's an edit to the project and not to the actual data within the layer so anyway we've got a single symbol symbology at the moment and what we want to do we can get rid of the opacity now because we are wanting to overlay this on our base map without the base map actually showing through so what we do is we we need to do a characterized symbology and we're going to characterize the symbology based on the habitat code we click on classify here and then all the different habitats are giving at the moment it's set as random color if we press apply though and then we can look that they're all different colors based on habitat type but it looks horrendous and it's not looking like a standard a as one would look like so we need a file that contains all of stylings for phase one I will post this on the Facebook group page I couldn't use the one that I usually use because it was created at work so I can't hand that out willingly I've had to recreate one by downloading from the GNCC website they've got a dot style file which has meant for ArcGIS and not QGIS so it didn't work straight away I've had to run it through a few of the programs to actually convert it to the right format which is XML so what we need to do to get that XML file into QGIS is to go to settings and style manager you'll see that there's some these are the favorites at the moment that are up here they're just kind of defaults it's nothing that I've actually defined as favorites if we look at all then you'll see we've got some phase one things in here we've got some preset ones there's two versions of each because some are the ones that i've created from the GNCC file which are the ones that are just the numeric ones sorry just the ones with the code rather than the habitat description the ones that have the description on my other ones that I use at work and there's some edits to these based on the the actual gen CC publish ones some of these haven't converted over properly as well but most of them are correct and it'll get you started at least so what we need to do is go to import/export and we're going to import items we need to find the location of our style file I've got it down here it's an XML they are qml versions but I'm not a big fan of how they work and you haven't got a lot of control over making edits to them it's just sort of like a preset stylesheet that you apply based on values rather the yeah I'm just not comfortable using them I prefer XML it's only way you select that open it'll show you all of the available styles select all and then press import because I already have them import it's asking me if I want to overwrite so I'm just going to cancel that so now we close the style manager we open up properties for this again so our first first style will going to apply is building which is J 3.6 so if we double click on here and we can search for J 3.6 you can see there's the one from the new style file and that's the one from my own from my work 1 they're identical so nothing to really worry about there so for double well don't need it don't click on it just click OK that's now styled as black we've got some b6 grassland which is some semi improved put on the improved grassland B 6 you can see the difference between these styles here so we'll select that one HS hard standing there isn't a GNCC called for outstanding it would just usually go down as other habitat but I think it looks it's more sensible just to put a gray layer on it so I have a just a great color already sound pond G 1 standing water again you may disagree with some of these categories that I'm giving these but this is just an exercise on styling rather than on accurate phase 1 nothing and we've got some a one point one point one might choose broadleaves semi natural woodland remove that because we know there's no order there's nothing that doesn't actually have we format and then we'll click apply ok and now this is our there's one map as you can see unfortunately this style file doesn't have a white background on some of these symbols so what we can do is make a very quick edit to that so we can basically white out the background so the base map doesn't show through so if we double click on here so you can either double click directly on a symbol to edit it or go back through into properties and then symbology but it's just quicker if you just double click it here so basically these are all the items that make up this this style we need to add a new one we also need to move it to the very bottom go down Oh No so it's using the arrows so as you can see that's now that marker over the original marker over a blue background we don't want that we want a white background and then we'll take the line off the edge as well but it still got the original edge line if it had one and then if across ok that's now whited out there's some improved areas so that the base Maps no longer showing through haven't really given any attention to point and line features at this point so I'm just gonna very quickly draw a line I know on this site we've got hedgerow running down this side here so let's just stick that in it's exactly the same way as drawing a polygon let's just take these off I'm gonna use snapping on all layers because we're gonna snap to the the actual site boundary because if I know it's words down that side of the site and we'll just you vertex as well yeah stop drawn by left-clicking that's just one straight line all the way down accidentally clicked there so I'm gonna click that can't blame this mouse it's basically all the way down that line and right click to stop habitat type that's cold so that at the moment is styled as we have to our phase one when I brought these Styles in into the protein into QGIS I give them the tag of Gen CC converted so if you want to say all the all of the all the symbology that's been brought in through that particular layer you can use it you can use these tags to help kind of bring them up if you check that off it'll literally just show them all go ahead she'll then show you everything that has the word hedge so I'm wanting a species rich hedgerows with trees I didn't really say trees I know it does have trees in so we'll go for this one here J two point three point one I'll just Cool J two point three point one and this is what the converted symbology from GNCC looks like has opposed to my own custom one so I actually prefer some of these better I'll have to have a look at them well we just used the same style Philo I was given to you when I first died so let's apply that and go okay and then you'll see we've now got a hedgerow down the side of the site similar with point habitats let's just save and finish editing that point habitats the main thing that I use point habitats for things like scattered trees so if we actually find where I've put the the aerial photo they're just open that up look at the areas where we may have scattered trees outside of woodland groups again if you remember this wasn't a exercise in accurate mapping so just some trees we are going to have bits where we've got trees that probably should be considered the same working group but this is just an example how to map things not on how to do phase one service anyway you get the idea left click to place a point there's nothing you have to do after that it's only a single click because there's no distance or shape associated with points to do the symbology of points it's exactly the same because we're only using a single point in this layer we can use the single symbol get rid of that so can we use broadly for a three point one so as you can see that's a symbol that hasn't converted over properly and you could very easily just modify this to a kind of simple marker at the moment it's font we'll change that to a what's my other one what does my other one use so I've used marker simple marker and then a circle and this green color so I'm gonna copy that color so I actually go to edit this three point one just to make it the same just to show you guys how to actually edit one of these so again it's marker I'm gonna use a simple marker just like that from here and then you've got a circle down the bottom I believe that's the same color just paste that anyway I'm gonna apply and all our trees will be shown by these green circles so I'll put the rest of the habitats back on now this is looking more and more like an actual phase once habitat survey and map now gonna turn the editing off of that layer all the other ones are finished as well so that's symbology on lines polygons and lines polygons and points so now we're going to look at how to label label features I think one of the obvious ones would be maybe to label the pond numbers see that we were referring to ponds and one of the in our report and we wanted these highlighted so we open the layer we go to labels we select single labels and we look at you just tell it which layer which attribute we're going to label it from and then we can have pond number here yeah buffer draw text buffer there's all sorts of different options you can use in here I'm not gonna go through these all because that in itself is a big lesson all I can say is play with them just open up a project create some shape files add some data to those shape files and just play with how the labeling works it's how I learned most of what I know yeah just just have a play you can see now we have our pond labeled up with with what they actually are so upon 1 upon 2 if we were wanting sort of like all features that have a label labeled up on the same map it would be a good idea to to actually have them in a in a single column I've done this deliberately like this because usually you'd have maybe a phase 1 habitat plan and then you might be single specifically showing plans for things like ponds and newts and bats and buildings and trees so a lot of the time I like to kind of have plans for individual things like that but you can't just put them all in one layer and then when you do that they'll they'll actually show up so I'm going to show you something a little bit more advanced with symbology that I occasionally use sometimes so we're going to use the buildings as an example and we've already we already in the attribute table have different data for these buildings in terms of their batteries potential so what we're gonna do is make a copy of this layer so going to duplicate it we're not copying the underlying data we're just basically saying we're creating a copy of this a copy of the formatting it's a different way of formatting the same layer within the same project it's basically from the start looks identical to the original one if we go into properties instead of the phase one code we're gonna use that potential and we're going to delete all the previous ones again doesn't get rid of any data just as overwriting the formats used by potential we've got two of them we apply that to that layer and then look everything is blue because it has no batteries potential then we've got the green and the other part up there let's make these more meaningful colors so I often put high potential buildings as red low potential we'll just leave that as green and then remove this because we don't want to actually display data where there's no value so we've got that now over there if we bring this up that will then display over the top of the original maybe we don't want to use a full block color but say let's go back into here and for high potential we'll put it transparent so the original black of the building shows through and then we give it a red dotted outline and then for this we can make that transparent stroke color okay we'll give it a green dotted outline okay something you can see around these buildings that they've actually got outline colors based on based on their batteries potential you could do something similar for the ponds as well to show ponds of different great crested newt HSI categories there's lots of different ways you can play around with symbology on a map sometimes you just want to you're a basic phase 1 map sometimes you want something a bit more complex if it gets too complicated and messy though it's a bad bap if it's not readable then don't do it make a separate map and highlight it that way but if you can incorporate multiple sets of data onto the same map and still make it readable for the end user then there's no good reason not to do that in this layer as well when we've got this we can add the lid we can add labels on this as well exactly the same way as before but obviously we're not using pom number we're using building number instead and then we'll have the building numbers associated with them as well so got building numbers on pom numbers and then the building's format differently we could have the pawns differently like I said symbology is all about what works on that particular map to make it clear to whoever's actually looking at it it's not clear simplify it make a separate map but if you can make it as a kind of hybrid map with multiple data sets on that can be great but anyway so that is symbology and labeling I'll just say with labeling I think I may have already said this but you have a whole load of different options for labels and it's the same with the symbology for well sorry the the symbology there's a load of different labels that you can play around with to make things look differently the best way to learn with them is just to play with them I'll probably deal with at some point in the future I'll probably do sort of like a styling and lay labeling master class specific focusing on that because it's a big top pick because there's a lot of different options that you can play around with and like say you got things like combining the same data multiple times with slightly different styling to make certain features stand out without too much kind of faff in the main attribute table but anyway that's enough for now on labeling in symbology and the next thing we're going to look at is finalizing this into something that would be suitable to then include in a report and send to a client

Channel: QGIS for Ecologists

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Id: -_dP1IRTtXc

Length: 53min 39sec (3219 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020