Conefor (previously known as Conefor Sensinode) is a tool to quantify the importance of habitat areas and links for the maintenance of connectivity. It is also used to evaluate the impacts on connectivity of habitat and landscape changes. Conefor is used to conduct a spatial ecology analysis and conservation planning. The Conefor for Processing plugin contains tools to prepare data and perform all types of analysis available in the Conefor.
The new plugin is a great addition to the Circuitscape provider I have developed before. Together, these plugins create a powerful set of tools for spatial ecology and conservation, allowing researchers from different fields to predict the movements of animals, evaluate the impact of climate change on range shifts, analyse the spread of invasive species or disease, understand how landscape patterns affect gene flow, and much more.
To be effective on the battlefield, make informed and timely decisions, the army needs to analyse tons of data. While all information comes from various sources and in different forms, it ends up being laid out on a map. There are many ways to represent it, and one of them is by using special symbols like the ones described by NATO APP-6D and DOD MIL-STD-2525D standards.
As QGIS 3.0 has entered the “hard freeze” phase, it is time to update the plugins. I decided to start with Processing providers, as they are the most relevant. As of today, all of them are updated and available for installation from my plugin repository:
Circuitscape for Processing — analysis of heterogeneous landscapes (for example, to model movement, gene flow of plants and animals, or to identify areas important for connectivity conservation)
WhiteboxTools provides a set of spatial analysis tools, primarily for raster data. It was developed as a response to numerous requests coming from users of the specialized GIS called Whitebox GAT. People wanted to use Whitebox GAT functionality in automated data processing workflows. At the time of this post, WhiteboxTools already contains more than 250 tools from Whitebox GAT and about the same number will be added in the near future. The WhiteboxTools for Processing plugin I have developed integrates these tools into QGIS.
The plugin is already available from my plugin repository. Only QGIS 3.0 is supported. Currently, the plugin has an experimental status, so do not forget to enable experimental plugins in the QGIS Plugin Manager settings. In addition to the plugin, you should also download and install WhiteboxTools and specify their location in the Processing settings.
Today PacktPublishing released another book about QGIS, which contains quite a lot of my work. The book is available in both printed and electronic forms.
QGIS 2 Cookbook
As the title suggests, QGIS 2 Cookbook provides a set of carefully selected and detailed recipes for using QGIS to solve different GIS tasks: from the basic ones (such as loading spatial data from various sources) to the advanced ones (working with vector topology, developing own plugins).
Many thanks to my co-authors: Alex Mandel, Anita Graser and Victor Olaya. It was a real pleasure to work with them, and being a part of a large team of authors was a very useful experience.
Have you ever tried to pass the coordinates of any location by phone or explain to someone where to find a specific place on a map in the absence of a map? This is not an easy task: not everyone can easily memorize long coordinates, and it is difficult to recognize them, especially when spelling over the phone. Of course, there are different techniques designed to simplify this. For example, one can say coordinate in full, spell it by individual numbers, or even use the International Phonetic Alphabet (of course, if interlocutors are familiar with it). But anyway, it is slow, inconvenient, and error-prone.
In such cases, the what3words service comes to the rescue. With its help, one can pass the coordinates of any location with 3 meters of accuracy in just three words. All you need to do is install the Android/iOS application or open the website, find the desired point on a map, and copy three words that encode the point’s coordinates. For instance, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Svobody square, 4), where the GIS-Forum 2016 is currently taking place, is at robes.mimics.array.
The service is free and already supports 8 languages. The number of supported languages grows every month.
QGIS users can install the plugin of the same name developed by BoundlessGeo. The plugin allows you to get the coordinates of any point in what3words notation and quickly navigate to a location defined by what3words coordinates.
If you have been using QGIS for ages, you surely know what the fTools plugin is. For a long time, it was practically the only tool for performing vector geoprocessing operations. With the advent of Processing, the need for fTools significantly decreased because most of the fTools algorithms were also available in Processing. And today, the fTools era is over.
All fTools algorithms that were missing from Processing have been implemented. The fTools plugin has been removed. Processing has been “taught” to create menu entries and bind algorithms to them. This means that the “Vector” menu has not disappeared, and you will find all the tools in their usual places. The only difference is that instead of custom fTools dialogs, you will see automatically generated Processing dialogs.
Months of hard work and sleepless nights; tight deadlines; numerous discussions, arguments, and compromises, all these are finally behind us. We have done it! My first book — QGIS By Example — is ready and will soon be available in printed and electronic forms at Packt Publishing.
QGIS By Example
Today I would like to express my gratitude to Werner Macho and Nyall Dawson for their reviews and invaluable comments. I would also like to thank the publisher in general and its editorial team in particular for their advice and assistance, patience and understanding. My biggest thanks go to my co-author, Daria Svidzinska, for her support and invaluable contribution to the book. I am also immensely grateful to all my friends and family for their support and encouragement.
The results of the project selection for GSoC 2015 have been announced. This year, the requirements for the projects were stricter and the number of slots was much smaller. Therefore, the fact that QGIS has been selected is even more gratifying. Marcus Santos will work on multithreading support in Processing, and Victor Olaya and I will be his mentors.
When viewing TMS layers in QGIS, as well as in any other GIS, the background map may be blurred if the current map scale does not match the scale of the tiles. The reason for this is a feature of TMS, namely the use of a fixed set of so-called “zoom levels”: tiles are generated only for certain scales defined by the data provider.
So to get a sharp image, you should only use the scales that correspond to the zoom levels of the selected TMS service. For OpenStreetMap, the formula for calculating the scale for each zoom level can be found on this page, and a similar approach can be used for other services.
Some time ago I added a special widget to QGIS to select a map scale from a given set. Later, it became possible to edit this list and define a set of scales on a global level as well as on a project level. So if your project uses TMS layers, you can create your own list of scales and switch between them. At the same time, you still have the option of using any intermediate scale values.
Another option is to install the Tile Map Scale plugin. This plugin allows you to easily connect popular TMS layers (remember about ToS!). It also monitors map scale changes and automatically sets the nearest correct TMS scale. Note that you will not be able to use intermediate scale values in this case.
Finally, QGIS has a built-in widget for changing the scale according to the layer’s scale list. It can be found in “View → Panels → Tile scale” or from the toolbar context menu.
