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New publication: Environmental Gap Analysis to Prioritize Conservation...
Just got an article out in PlosOne. Analysis were carried out and maps and figures created using a stack of open source tools, including GRASS GIS, R, and QGIS. The article addresses the question...
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Another stab at creating a Tanaka-style contour map
In a recent post Anita Graser (aka underdark) showed how to create illuminated or Tanaka contours in QGIS using various functions available in the toolbox and some custom functions. Here I want to...
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First release candidate of the upcoming GRASS GIS 7.0.1 version is out
GRASS GIS 7.0.1 RC1 is the upcoming stability release and provides a series of stability fixes, manual improvements and a few language translations. This first release candidate GRASS GIS 7.0.1RC1...
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QGIS 2.10 Pisa is out!
The new QGIS 2.10 (Pisa) has been released, with many great new features, tweaks and enhancements. Check out the changelog for the highlights (you’ll need some time, it is again an impressive list of...
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Accessing shared files on Linux from Windows (trouble shooting / if solutions...
The problem I work in a shared Linux – Window environment and sharing files between computers has always been somewhat cumbersome. Most of the time I was able to access files in a shared folder on the...
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Vegetation map for eastern Africa 2.0
Check out the new vegetation map and accompanying tools for identifying and selecting the right tree for the right place in eastern Africa at http://vegetationmap4africa.org. The potential natural...
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GRASS GIS categorical maps and legends
Did you ever add a legend to your categorical raster map in GRASS GIS that displayed many more categories than your map actually has? It can happen if that map was ‘cut out’ from a larger region using...
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Counting number of layers returned by g.list in GRASS GIS
I am running a script that is producing a very large number of layers. As it takes a while, I wanted to find out how many layers were already created using the command line. Trivial thing perhaps, but...
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The QGIS GRASS plugin is back
For me, one of the killer features of QGIS has always been the integration with GRASS GIS. With the GRASS GIS plugin, introduced about 10 years ago, QGIS basically provided an alternative interface for...
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First release candidate of the upcoming GRASS GIS 7.0.2 version
Fresh from the press, that is, the GRASS email list: The first release candidate of the upcoming GRASS GIS 7.0.2 is out. This upcoming stability release provides a series of stability fixes and manual...
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QGIS 2.12 ‘Lyon’ released
A great thanks to the QGIS developers for this new version, with some exciting new features and improvements, such improvements to PostGIS connections in browser and the DB Manger tool, conditional...
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PyGRASS equivalent of piping results from one function to another
When using GRASS commands on the command line, one very neat little trick is to ‘pipe’ results from one function directly to another. An example I used in an earlier post is: So, how does that works in...
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GRASS GIS categorical raster layers in QGIS
With the QGIS GRASS plugin, you can easily open a GRASS raster layer in QGIS. One disadvantage, however, is that if your GRASS layer has category labels, these will not show in the QGIS legend. See for...
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Second release candidate GRASS GIS 7.02
The second release candidate of GRASS GIS 7.02 has been released, providing further fixes and improvements. See the official announcement for more information and the download links. A big thanks to...
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Importance of spatial data accuracy – of protected areas
Geographic information systems (GIS) tool are becoming increasingly important in conservation and natural resource management planning and implementation. The good news is that it is also getting...
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Picture Pile; play and help science
There is a successor of Cropland Capture, Picture Pile, from the people behind Geo-Wiki. Like Cropland Capture, this tool / game uses a citizen science approach, in this case to track deforestation....
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GRASS GIS 7.0.2 released
For those who haven’t seen it yet, GRASS GIS 7.0.2 has been released! See here for the announcement and here for a detailed overview of all the changes (over 190 of stability fixes and improvements...
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Finding open data for the Netherlands
Open data is becoming increasingly important and there are considerable advantages, such as accountability, cost and time savings for users, easier knowledge sharing and increased efficiency in public...
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The r.series function applied to a range of values
One of the fundamental functions in GRASS GIS is the r.series function. It makes each output cell value a function of the values assigned to the corresponding cells in the input raster map layers. I...
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Compiling the gdal-grass plugin for GRASS 7
The idea of the GDAL-GRASS plugin is to directly access GRASS raster and vector data from outside. Any GDAL enabled software (QGIS, R, …) can read and write through the plugin from the GRASS database....
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Metadata management in GRASS GIS – save your metadata as PDF
The metadata support in GRASS GIS was seriously improved with the introduction of a new metadata management tool back in 2014 during the Google Summer of Code of that year. The addon added tools for...
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GRASS GIS addon to create smoothed legend image
I just uploaded a small addon for GRASS GIS, r.out.legend, with which you can quickly create a smoothed legend image for floating point raster maps (continuous values as opposed to categories). You...
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GRASS GIS 7.0.3 RC1 is out
The first release candidate of GRASS GIS 7.0.3 is out. This version includes 160 stability fixes and manual improvements, and perhaps most exciting for many GRASS GIS users on Windows, there is now...
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Plot of temporal data sets in GRASS GIS
One of the new modules in GRASS GIS 7.03 (RC1) is g.gui.tplot. It is part of the temporal data processing framework (TGRASS) introduced with GRASS GIS 7.0 and lets you plot the values of one or more...
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QGIS 2.14 ‘Essen’ has been released
The QGIS development team has released version 2.14 of QGIS. This is a special release since it is designated an ‘LTR’ (Long Term Release), which means it will be supported with back ported bug fixes...
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Update of r.forestfrag addon
I just updated the r.forestfrag addon for GRASS GIS. The addon, which I described before, was developed based on an script by Sylla consult, and can be used to characterizes the degree of...
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Sample raster values at point location in QGIS – yet another way
A while back I wrote how one can sample raster values at point locations in QGIS using the Saga function ‘Add grid values to point’, which is available in the processing toolbox. Recently it was...
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VIF stepwise variable selection
Abstract In modelling, multicollinearity in the set of predictor variables is a potential problem. One way to detect multicollinearity is the variance inflation factor analysis (VIF). In GRASS GIS, the...
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Use R to get gbif data into a GRASS database
Introduction GBIF The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international open data infrastructure that allows anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on Earth, shared...
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Climate data sets, which one to select?
For species or vegetation modelling, one of the first choices to make is the selection of explanatory variables, which in most cases will include climatic or bioclimatic data sets. One of the most...
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A GRASS GIS addon to upload raster values and labels to a point layer
A new GRASS GIS addon to upload raster values and labels to a point layer
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The first release candidate of GRASS GIS 7.2.0 is out
I have been using the development version for some time now, and all I can say is that you definitely should give the new GRASS GIS 7.2.0RC1 release a try. It is, in my experience, very stable, and it...
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Saving space on your HD – null file compression in GRASS GIS 7.2
The GRASS GIS development team recently released a new stable major release, GRASS GIS 7.2. The release brings more than 1900 fixes and improvements since the previous stable release 7.0.5. You’ll find...
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New release RQGIS
From an announcement from the QGIS mailing list: RQGIS has released a new version of RQGIS! RQGIS establishes an interface between R and QGIS, i.e. it allows the user to access the QGIS geoalgorithms...
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Terrain attribute selection in environmental studies
Terrain attribute selection Exploring species-environment relationships is important for amongst others habitat mapping, biogeographical classification, conservation, and management. And it has become...
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Exporting rasters to Mbtiles using GDAL
Web maps are generally made up of many small, square images called tiles, which are placed side by side in order to create the illusion of a very large seamless image [for a good explanation, see...
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Update r.vif add-on for GRASS GIS
I just updated the r.vif add-on. The add-on let’s you do a step-wise variance inflation factor (VIF) procedure. As explained in more detail here, the VIF can be used to detect multicollinearity in a...
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GRASS and Pandas – from attribute table to pandas dataframe
Introduction In this post I show how to import an attribute table of a vector layer in a GRASS GIS database into a Pandas data frame. Pandas stands for Python Data Analysis Library which provides...
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Plotting GRASS data in Python
GRASS GIS offers some useful but basic plotting options for raster data. However, for plotting of data in attribute tables and for more advanced graphs, we need to use other software tools. In this...
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GRASS GIS 7.2.1 released
After four months of development the new update release GRASS GIS 7.2.1 is available. It provides more than 150 stability fixes and manual improvements compared to the first stable release version...
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K-fold cross validation in GRASS GIS
A common technique to estimate the accuracy of a predictive model is k-fold cross-validation. In k-fold cross-validation, the original sample is randomly partitioned into a number of sub-samples with...
View ArticleGRASS GIS Jupyter notebooks
A great source of information about GRASS GIS is the GRASS Wiki. One example is this list with GRASS GIS Jupyter notebooks which was just added by Markus Neteler (no introduction needed I guess). There...
View ArticleHands-on course to GIS and Remote Sensing with GRASS GIS
The hands-on GRASS GIS course at ITC – University of Twente on November 3rd, 2017 was a great success. The course, organized by ITC and OSGeo.nl, offered a very nice introduction to GRASS GIS by...
View ArticleDraw a histogram of vector attribute column in GRASS GIS
GRASS GIS has convenient tools to draw histograms of raster values. As similar tool to draw a histogram of values in a vector attribute table lacks. But you can easily add this functionality by...
View ArticleData exploration in GRASS GIS – boxplots
I am currently working on some exercises for which I need data about municipalities in the Netherlands. A good place to look for such data is the CBS (Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics). One data...
View ArticleUpdate release GRASS GIS 7.4.4
For those who missed it, a new update release GRASS GIS 7.4.4 is available since the 4th of January. It mainly brings bugfixes, but it also includes an important new function, the module...
View ArticleGRASS GIS 7.6.0 released
After almost 1 year of development the GRASS Development team has released the new stable release GRASS GIS 7.6.0. A big thanks to all developers for their work and dedication! There is a lot to like,...
View ArticleHigh resolution maps of the human population density in Africa
Population density maps have multiple implications, e.g., to help relief agencies to better plan where they are needed most in case of disaster and in demographic, economic and environmental research....
View ArticleGRASS GIS 7.8.3 released
The latest and greatest GRASS GIS 7.8.3 released. See the announcement on https://grass.osgeo.org/news/89/15/GRASS-GIS-7-8-3-released/. And if you haven’t updated to the 7.8 release series yet, make...
View ArticleEcostudies EOL
I have kept a blog on this site for quite some years. It was mostly about using open source GIS tools. Although I enjoyed writing the posts, other things became more important, and I haven’t written a...
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