Learning the Open Source GIS Stack: QGIS 3x Desktop

Making sure you can operate at peak performance is a critical piece of good GIS analysis.  The project menu allows us to set the parameters for effectively using QGIS.  You'll learn how to set project properties, set up security parameters, and present data to your users in an intelligent way.

Map navigation in QGIS goes way beyond panning and zooming.  QGIS has sophisticated tools for interacting with your data by identifying features, selecting data based on queries, variables, and obtaining high-level statistical summaries.  In this video, we'll see how to interact with both the vector and attribute data.  This of course is limited to the map canvas and navigation tool bar - we'll dive into some really sophisticated capabilities later in the training, but this section will help you master the basic navigation tools you'll perform 90% of the time.  And, if you already use other GIS software, you'll be impressed with the flexibility you have in QGIS.

You can't use a GIS if you can't get data into it.  QGIS has some of the most sophisticated ways to access data.  Whether it's reading basic GIS files like ESRI shapefiles and geodatabases, or reading spatial objects out of enterprise class spatial databases, or even pulling data in from the cloud, QGIS is incredibly powerful, and puts most commercial GIS software to shame.

In this section, you will learn how to bring in raster and vector data from multiple sources, and begin working with many disparate data sources.  In many ways, QGIS is a keystone to accessing all your different data formats, and this video will help you to confidently work with the various sources of data in GIS.  In fact, at the end of this lecture you'll have brought in file based GIS data from shapefiles, kml, and geodatabases, enterprise level data from Postgres, and cloud-based data from multiple, remote servers, proving that QGIS is one of the most powerful data integrators in the GIS field. 

QGIS has outstanding capabilities to bring in basemaps from all over the world, including Open Street Map, Google Maps, and Bing.  This short lecture is going to show you how to bring in these beautiful cartographic products into your QGIS environment. 

QGIS allows you to manage your layers in a very sophisticated manner.  In this section you'll learn how to copy, duplicate, change zoom parameters, group, and filter layers.  These capabilities are really important for managing your data, especially when it gets large. 

QGIS allows you to query attribute data, just like any other GIS.  But, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised when you see how powerful the attribute capabilities are.  In a QGIS environment, you can query both your attributes and geometries within the same query tool.  You'll also see the flexibility of the field calculator. 

QGIS has really powerful capabilities for symbolizing data - choropleth maps, pie charts, labeling, and advanced classification.  This lecture will provide an overview of the many capabilities for symbolizing GIS data in QGIS. 

Like any good GIS, QGIS has a lot of sophisticated tools for editing vector data.  This lecture is going to introduce you to many of the editing capabilities that QGIS has.  Keep in mind, this will only scratch the surface of the kinds of editing tools that QGIS has.  But, the tools we'll look at will be enough to get you through 90% of the kinds of editing you might perform in a GIS project. 

If you edit vector data, you obviously will need to edit attribute data.  This lecture is going to review the attribute editing capabilities in QGIS including how to restructure tables as well as changing individual attributes.

QGIS has tons of classic vector GIS operations, easily accessible from the menu bar.  In this lecture, we'll explore a few of the classic vector GIS operations.  Keep in mind, there are other, really sophisticated vector operations that QGIS performs, and we'll explore those later.  But for now, these might be considered the easily accessible bread and butter vector GIS operations.

No GIS can do everything.  But, in the case of QGIS, there are thousands of users out there who have created their own solutions, and made them available by way of plug-ins.  With plug-ins, you can find all kinds of interesting GIS solutions that other users have made available. 

In this lecture, we'll look at a few of the plug-ins that are available.  But, we are going to do something different: I'm going to choose plug-ins that I've never tried before, and start working with them 'live', warts and all.  It is a great way for you to not only see some cool capabilities available through the plug-ins, but you'll also see how easy these plug-ins are to use, given that I'm going to be testing them out with you. 

You do not want to miss these next lectures.  If you only stick with the menus in QGIS, you are going to miss most of the really incredible functionality that you have access to.  In fact, most users think the only capabilities within QGIS are what is found in the main manu.  Sadly, many users stop utilizing QGIS because they simply don't realize the vast number of sophisticated GIS tools are right at their fingertips.

The processing toolbar gives you access to over 100 different spatial and non spatial tasks.  And the cool thing is that it isn't just limited to QGIS.  You can use processes from other products like GRASS, SAGA, and GDAL to perform GIS related tasks.  A survey of all the tasks available through the processing toolbox would take hours.  So instead, we'll look at some of the more interesting processes that you have access to.  Keep in mind, you can always scroll through the tasks, read the descriptions, and even click on the "help" button to learn more about what each task does.

Like the title of this section says, if you wonder if QGIS actually can perform a task, the chances are it can, and the more likely place to find it is in the processing toolbar.

Did you know that QGIS can work interactively with third-party enterprise databases like Postgres and SQL Server.  And when we say work interactively, we don't mean that it can just look at data.  We mean that we can perform full-on spatial SQL.  That means if you can write SQL, you can have QGIS act as a display module for these enterprise databases! 

But, that's not all - QGIS can connect to SQLite and the Spatialite library, so you can also issue spatial SQL against SQLite databases. 

But, what might be the most amazing capability, is that once you bring a layer in from another data source (whether it is a shapefile, KML, or geodatabase), you can start issuing SQL and spatial SQL on those layers too.  That's right!  QGIS can issue spatial SQL commands against and ESRI spatial database!  This is really a game changer in the way that spatial data analytics performs - you can use QGIS to connect to multiple data sources, and issue spatial SQL commands with ease.

The takeaway - You need to learn spatial SQL if you want to truly master spatial data analytics.  This lecture is just a start, and will get you on your way to performing spatial analytics with SQL and QGIS.

This lecture is going to show you how to create a graphical model in QGIS.  This is a similar capability you find in other GIS products like Model Builder within ArcGIS.  QGIS models allow you to define data variables and algorithms.  When you learn how to create a model, you can run that model over and over, store it in your project, or send it to a colleague so that they can run the model on their own data.  With a model, your users no longer have to worry about the underlying functionality within QGIS, but can simply run the model and have sophisticated capabilities run for them. 

In this lecture we are going to use a number of spatial tools to perform a land use change analysis.  Specifically, we are going to read land use / land cover data for Tompkins County over the cloud, correct missing data in the database, perform a topological intersection of the data, and then create a cross tabulation matrix using the GROUP STATS add-in.  This is a sophisticated analysis that will really demonstrate the power of QGIS to perform some really advanced GIS work.

This is the second part of the assessing land use change application.  In part 1 we prepared the data.  In this lecture, we will run the analysis and interpret the results.

Watersheds are a critical part of environmental analysis. We often need to know the boundaries of a watershed in order to assess the impact that external processes may have to an ecological area. Similarly, we might be assessing a point location, and want to understand he characteristics of the upslope area. 

Given the importance of watersheds, we are going to learn how to create watershed boundaries and upstream contributing areas using digital elevation models and the raster tools available in QGIS and SAGA.

Now that we understand the process for creating a watershed using SAGA and QGIS together, we are now going to try and turn those steps into a single model.  Once completed, we'll have a model that merges DEMs together, fills the sinks, and generates the upslope area for a particular point.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to obtain the Dot Density plug-in from QGIS and create a dot density map.  Also, we'll get our data directly from the web.  Dot density maps are powerful tools for communicating counts of data within areas, so this is a great tool to learn how to use.

Did you know that QGIS has the ability to perform sophisticated routing using the OpenStreetMap open route service?  It's really incredible - you can perform least cost paths, creating isochrones, and even  create distance matrices.  You'd think something like this would take a long time to explain, but you'll be amazed that one of our shorter videos can show you how to do all this sophisticated routing using QGIS.

As we've previously seen, QGIS has a lot of raster capabilities.  For this lecture, we are going to combine what we previously learned into a map algebra analysis for defining an ecological habitat.  This is another example of tying in those menu items we learned about previously, into an actual working project with real data.  You'll see that QGIS has the same capabilities as other GIS programs for performing raster analysis.

More and more results for GIS analysis are finding their way on the web.  It is a great way to collaborate with others, and QGIS makes it easy with their qgis2web plug-in.  This video will show you how to use qgis2web to create web enabled results from your QGIS projects and analysis.

QGIS has the capability to produce high-quality cartographic products.  This video is going to be short - very short.  But, the point of it is to show you some of the basic cartographic tools available in QGIS as part of the Layout capabilities.  We're only going to introduce basic things like legends, scale bars, grids, titles, and thematic rendering.  This is a nice start to learning how to create more sophisticated maps in QGIS.

All the gisadvisor.com courses have your learning in mind.  There is a method to the madness.  We focus on the complete FOSS4g technology stack, including the desktop, server, and developer aspects of GIS.  Also, we have decided to stick with a single community: Tompkins County, NY.  This way, you'll see how to use all the different FOSS4g tools with the same data, and we'll even solve the same problems using both desktop GIS tools, SQL queries, and python scripting.  That way, you'll know the benefits that each technology stack brings to your problem solving toolbox. 

You can jump in to any class, at any time.  Just visit www.gisadvisor.com to get access to the courses.

Finally, it gives me no greater joy than to hear the wonderful stories people tell me about how these courses helped them in their job, or helped them to obtain another job because of the skills they've learned.  So please, send me an email about how these courses have helped you become a better GIS professional.