QGIS Land Degradation and Development

This is the QGIS manual for the course Land Degradation and Development. This documentation is based on the manual written for the course. Work performed on creating this manual was performed out of office hours and therefore constitutes original work of the author. Furthermore, because this tutorial is heavily based n the documentation and a derivative work, it would not be possible to not publicly release this tutorial. The QGIS documentation is excellent, and where applicable, this tutorial will refer to the appropriate section in the documentation, rather than re-doing the work done by others.

In this tutorial, there are several different levels.

• exercises are necessary to complete for the practical.

• exercises are very useful to complete for your understanding of GIS and it will be very likely that you will need these skills later in life. However, you do not need to complete these for proper completion of the course.

• exercises are only there for the very interested students with extra time on their hands. Most of these are concerned with making custom processes or obtaining data. I personally think these are the most fun. These are there to help you in case you ever need to do something similar to what has been done in this practical. Once the manual is finished, doing these exercises will allow you to create this practical from scratch: from obtaining data to creating the QRichDem plugin.

The data is provided on Brightspace, and convenience scripts can be downloaded here.

• 1. An introduction to (Q)GIS
  • 1.1. Installing QGIS
  • 1.2. Geo-Information Science and Sustainable Land Management (SLM)
  • 1.3. Getting to know QGIS
  • 1.4. First operations
  • 1.5. Making a Print layout
• 2. Loading and interpolating precipitation data
  • 2.1. Loading a table and converting to a point layer
  • 2.2. Interpolating point data
• 3. Creating a simple model
  • 3.1. implementing the model with r.neighbors
  • 3.2. Implementing the algorithm with Focal statistics
  • 3.3. Running the model
  • 3.4. In Conclusion Wrapping up
• 4. The Morgan-Morgan-Finney Erosion model
  • 4.1. About the MMF Erosion model
  • 4.2. Pre-processing the data
  • 4.3. Processing the data in the MMF model
  • 4.4. Applying Soil Water Conservation measures
• 5. Making custom scripts with additional functionality
  • 5.1. Follow Along: Creating a script for the mask file
  • 5.2. Follow Along: Making a script for rasterizing like
  • 5.3. Follow Along: Making a script for batch rasterizing
• 6. Comparison between QGIS and ArcGIS
  • 6.1. Data handling
  • 6.2. Model building