 Hello, in this video I'm going to show how to visualize rivers and basins from HydroSheds. HydroSheds is free data on rivers and basins in the world and derived products, it's open data and in the video I'm going to demonstrate some of the renderers in QGIS to make a really cool visualization. This video is part of the IHE Delft summer course on creating data visualizations with graphs, maps and animations. The tutorials are also available at GISOpenCourseWare.org, you can find the link in the description of this video. You can find the data at HydroSheds.org and scroll down and there you can find the button explore the data. Then you'll see here the different data products in the links in the navigation menu and we're going to use HydroBasins and HydroRivers, but if you scroll down you see examples of the products that are available here for download. Click on HydroBasins and scroll down. In the data download section choose the continent for which you want to make the styling, here we will use Europe and use the customized with lakes version. Save this in a folder that you dedicate to this tutorial. Now also download the HydroRivers product, also here I will download Europe and Middle East. It's a shapefile. As you can see these are zip files that we need to extract. So extract the files using 7zip or the internal tool for Windows and make sure that they end up in the correct folder. You can find the PDF with the metadata description on how this layer was generated and what the attributes are of the shapefile and that's always important to check before you start using the data. For example here are the attributes and we're going to use here the portstrah, the strahler order field in the shapefile to style it later. It's also important to check the license agreement for using this data and how you need to do the acknowledgement and citation of the data when you use it in your GIS products. But let's add the downloaded data to a new QGIS project. This is the layer with the polygons for the basins including the lakes and this is the layer with the rivers. Drag the layer with the basin polygons to the top, select it and activate the layer styling panel. For our visualization we want to have random colors for each polygon. So we're going to switch to graduated and there we can choose a value from the attribute table but that will not give us a nice distribution of colors. So what we're going to do is create a function in the expression and you can search for a rent or find it under math, rent, double click and on the right side you can read how it works so it needs a minimum and maximum value that's the range within it will pick a random value for each polygon. So we choose a range from 0 to 9999 and then click OK and we change the color ramp to random colors and then change the amount of classes to 150 and you see it's immediately applied and every time we click classify or it has to redraw the canvas it will again sample random values so in the end you need to make sure that the colors are nice when you export it to an image. Now let's focus on the rivers layer. If you click right and choose properties then in the layer properties in the information tab when you scroll down you can also see all the attributes that are available and then we can use for styling and as we already figured out we're going to use the strahla orders which are integer values with the strahla orders. Click the simple line renderer and change the symbol layer type to interpolated line. This is a newer render in QJS where we can vary the width of a line with an attribute and the color so for varying the width we choose the strahla orders. You can see that it's quite slow for this big data set so be patient and if you click the refresh button then it will calculate the minimum maximum value which is from 1 to 9. If you uncheck the live update button then it will be quicker because then every time you change something the map covers will not be redrawn. Change the minimum width to 0 and the maximum width to 1 millimeters and now in the color section change to varying color and also here use the strahla orders for the start and end value and here it fills in the correct values for min and max. If that's not the case click the refresh button. You use a grayscale color ramp because that will work well when we blend it later with the basins. Let's click apply to see the result and this already looks very nice. Without the basins it would make more sense to use blues. I check the box live update again so it will be updated with every change that we make and I change it back to grays for the next step. Now let's combine the rivers with the basin layer. Click the checkbox to activate it and make sure it's a target layer in the layer styling panel. There we go to the layer rendering section and we use blending mode soft light. There we get this very nice effect. To learn more about blending modes I can advise to have a look at this blog from Helen McKenzie where it gives a great explanation about these blending modes. Now it would be nicer if the background is black so go to the project properties and under general you can change the background color and we'll use black. Now also change the projection to the equal earth projection as we did before with green ridge in the center. If you use another continent then choose one of the other equal earth projections. Let's make the data ready for export to a picture so zoom into the area that you want to export later and as good practice we still need to add the data credits and the author of the map. So go to the view menu and choose decorations and there choose copyright label. Check the box to enable the copyright label and replace the text and we use for source hygrosheds and also add the URL and you can add cartographer and then your name. Make sure you change the font to white because we have a black background and then you can't see the black text and for placement choose bottom left. Click okay to apply, notch the map and if you're okay with the colors then you can export this as a picture or make a screenshot. Go to project, import export, export map to image. You can keep the defaults if you want to print you can choose a higher resolution you can copy to clipboard or you can save it to a png file. You can take some time but once it's saved you can find the link and go to the place where it's stored and open it in a picture viewer and this is our nice result so try this for your own continent.