 Hello everybody. Welcome in this live session for the launch of the book QGIS for Hydrological Applications, second edition. And I'm very happy that we're all here who have contributed to the book or are benefiting from the QGIS Hydro Book Fund. But we also have a host in this live session and that's Amy Burtz, maybe you know her from the QGIS Open Days. Hi everyone, good to see you. I'll give the floor to Amy to guide us through the session. Oh, fantastic. Thanks so much, Hans. I'm so excited to be here. I've had a sneak preview of the QGIS for Hydrological Applications, second edition. It's a fantastic book. I love these kind of books that are recipes, tutorial style, easy to follow for anybody. So I'm so excited to be here and to talk to everybody who was instrumental in bringing out the second edition of the book. So the first thing I wanted to do was just go around the room, go around the room in order of, you know, how the book came out, etc. Just have everybody introduce themselves, how they were instrumental in the publication slash creation of the book, even if they were just a user or learned from this. And then please, can you tell me where you currently are in the world? I think it's important to understand that. So I will go first and then I'll hand over to Hans. So I'm Amy Vanessa, you probably know me from the QGIS Open Day. I am just honestly a fan of open source software using QGIS and getting involved with the community. And I come from Johannesburg, South Africa. So I'm going to hand over to Hans for his introduction, over to you. Thanks, Amy. So I'm Hans van der Kwaast and you're watching this video through my channel. And I'm tuning in here from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This is my home office with some nice maps made with QGIS, of course, and open data. And yeah, my contributions, of course, being co-author of the book QGIS for hydrological applications and the great teamwork with Kurt about it and focusing mostly on the analytical parts in the book. Oh, fantastic. Thanks so much, Hans. I think that's a great segue to hop over to Kurt, who is also a co-author of the book, a VTU Kurt. Hi, I'm also in my home office tonight in Helsing, Denmark. I work for Septima, which is based in Copenhagen. And yeah, I focus on a lot of data visualizations. So I focused on that part of the book, doing print layouts. And I'm really excited that we have the second edition because there's a lot of important updates in it. Fantastic. Then I'd like to go over to our publishers, et cetera, people who are involved in Locate Press. So let's start with Tyler. Yeah, hi. I'm a founder of Locate Press. We started that 10 years ago. Also helped us co-found OSGO. So been doing a lot of promo and open source geo stuff for a long time now. And we started the company, launched Gary Sherman's relaunch of his desktop GIS book way back when. And then he took care of the company for a long time and is now still editing and helping me, but I'm working more on Locate Press these days. Fantastic. Thank you so much. And then over to you, Gary. Just give us an introduction and where you're from. There's a lot of echo, Gary. I think, let's see if you can improve it from your side. For now, let's hop over to then Natalia while Gary sorts the secondary mic out. Natalia, just introduce yourself and tell us where you're from. I'm Natalia. I'm from Colombia, but now today I'm in the Alps, the Netherlands. So I'm an hour and engineer and I've been just in this open source world with a project that I had that it came from the Whopper Hackathon. And that is called the Whopper Game. So I've been just introduced to the open source in world with this project and also with the help and support of the KJS book fund. Fantastic. Fantastic. And then over to you, Celine. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Celine Poppall. Let's hop on back to Gary and see if he's back with us. Can you hear me? Yes. Am I intelligible? Yes, no more aliens. Not intelligent, just intelligible. I'm Gary Sherman. I founded QJIS some 20 years ago. Been a little bit of everything in my career from a geologist to a mining engineer to a software developer to an author to cleaning up Tyler's messes and making bigger problems for him. I'm not officially associated with Locate Press anymore. I ran the company for about eight, 10 years. But now I'm a freelance consultant for Locate Press. And I did a bit of editing on the hydrological book as well as fixing up some of the other issues with it. And I am in the, at the moment, sunny state of Alaska, USA, where it may reach 70 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time today. I can't believe you have a T-shirt on. I am in Africa, where it's boiling and you can see my beautiful jacket. No, we're going into winter now. Alrighty, over to you, Celine. I hear congratulations are in order. I just graduated. So congratulations. Please introduce yourself. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Yes, I am Celine Safi from Lebanon. Sorry for the bad connection. This is a proof that I am in Lebanon. And I have just graduated from IHE and I have used QGIS in my thesis to show how the spatial and temporal variability can be used and how data can be used. And of course I used all the seminar and tutorial from Professor Hans into my thesis because it was very useful. Because also when you have big data, it's very useful to transform it into information for decision making. And also it is interesting because in Lebanon, we have an open map community and it's very interesting. It is founded by three women and two men. So it's interesting to empower also women in this sector. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Celine. Alright, I'd like to now continue into some questions about why we hear the book. So let's start off, Boeckert and Hans, I think. Let's start off with Hans. I'd like to talk about basically hydrological applications and using open source software. So let me know what's new in the second edition. There's a lot of things new in the second edition. One chapter has been completely revised. That is the chapter about stream and catchment delineation. And people who have the first edition don't throw it away immediately. It's just an alternative way of doing the same using a different set of tools. So the workflow is still the same. It's a generic workflow that we use in GIS and hydrology to delineate streams and catchments. And you can apply this with all kinds of software. And in QGIS, we have access to different plugins and from different providers. So in the first edition, we've used a workflow with Saga with the tools from the processing toolbox. And we've replaced that in chapter 4 with the tools from the PC Raster Tools plugin, which is a plugin that I've been prototyping for a while and could finally have it released together with Nile Dawson from Northworld, from Australia, as an official QGIS plugin, which has been downloaded already more than 6,000 times. So I'd really like to see how people are going to use that. And therefore, it's also nice that in the book, we have a whole chapter about using these tools for stream and catchment delineation. Another change is that we've introduced the Raster Attribute Tables, also quite a new feature in QGIS, which opens up a whole set of use cases. You can link the Layer Styling Panel Styles to an attribute table where you can add extra attributes, control the colors, and lots of nice things. And we have changed a few of the datasets that were used. So in the first edition, we've used the Lantus Map from Kareem for chapter 5 on OpenData in the WMS service, the web service. And I thought it would be more interesting with our global audience to use something that's available everywhere. So in chapter 5, we're now using the ESA World Cover dataset, 10 meter resolution of Lantus Lamp Cover as a WMTS layer in QGIS. And of course, all kinds of smaller changes on functionality, on tools in QGIS, and things that improve the workflow and the experience of the user. Oh, that sounds absolutely amazing. For the viewers, I do apologize for my persistent cough. I've picked something up on some recent travels, so I do apologize for that. I will new to myself as far as possible. I'd like to hop over to Kurt for now, because I know that you worked on a lot of the styling features and the new things for the print layout in QGIS with the hydrological applications. So can you tell us in the book what's new for both styling and the print layout? Yeah, absolutely. So in general, one of the nice things about the book is not only is it a beautiful domain specific book, but there's a lot of tools in there that have broad application to any field that you're working in with QGIS. So there's a lot of symbology options. After every set of analysis steps, we show you how to style that kind of data beautifully on the map. And so with that, we're using all the latest renderers, for example, to beautifully render strailer order streams and taper them from the thickest stream down through the tributaries. For the print layout, we've incorporated legend patch shapes into the legend so that it's a beautiful new feature in QGIS where you can not only download and use legend patch shapes provided by the QGIS community, but you can also base a legend patch shape on one of the features of your data. And it just makes the resulting map much more intuitive to the map reader. And part of that improvement too is there's a new gradient legend option for rasters in a print layout. And so we also incorporate that change. So when you're done with all the analysis, you produce this really nice map at the end that shows you how to do things with map themes and use locator maps and lots of nice labeling tricks as well. So you really get a well rounded education as you go through the book. Oh, that sounds absolutely fantastic. I like the idea of going to play with the different patches. It's functionality that I've actually longed for in a map as a cartographer. So I'm keen to go and play around with that and see how the book takes us through doing that. Hansa, I wanted to ask you, how do you experience, is this book a good experience for someone who is not a hydrogeologist, someone who doesn't have that background? Will they also be able to do the recipes and follow along? I think so. I think this way of teaching we call that problem-based learning. So everything is set around the theme and you will learn the functionality of QGIS along with workflows for the theme. And that's a great way to learn functionality. I've seen courses where they introduce button for button. And that's a completely different way of learning software. So I think the experience with a more problem-based book is also an interesting one for many users. So don't be intimidated by the word hydrological applications. It's just one of the many, many applications that you can imagine to use GIS for. And this is just a great way to learn all this new functionality. Fantastic. And segueing from that, what have you been using this book in class and what is your experience? I know as a teacher and lecturer you must use this. So what is your experience of using this in the classroom? Yes, I think a hard-copy book is very useful if you do teaching in class because people need to have the software on their screens. And unfortunately these days computer rooms are not like in the past at universities. We now have more the system of bringing around laptop and they have all these small screens. And I even have to tell them to use a mouse. I think the students who are watching now recognize that. I always tell them it's for me because me as a non-millennial I'm not used to use the strange pad in front of them. So there are a lot of things that make our work difficult as GIS specialists. In this home office I have two big screens. I have a mouse. Everything is well equipped. But in the classroom unfortunately these days that's not the case. In my time we had of course all two screens and well equipped rooms. It also means that you have quite a high variability of installations and setups in your classroom. So I think a printed book in front of you where people really well read the steps is held by that. If they have to read it on screen on a PDF and swap between QGIS and the PDF. We see that students make a lot of reading mistakes or lose a bit of orientation in the materials. But I also see the value of having it as an additional to an e-learning environment where you also have the steps including all the multimedia that we can present. Fantastic. I think then I'll hop over to Celine because you of course have experienced online GIS teaching especially for open source software. So I wanted to ask you what's your experience of online teaching? I suppose specifically from Hans let's do a teacher review. But no tell me about your experience. Yes actually I was learning online the first five months. But honestly the tutorial we had of course made by Dr. Hans was they were very detailed. So you didn't have to like you could self learn it on your own and self base which helps a lot because you could do the assignments on your own on your on your own space. And it was very detailed like you could I still go back to these tutorials until now. I still have it and I still go back every time I want to make a map or use it use GIS specifically when I was doing my thesis in the last month. Fantastic. What was your thesis on? Just let us know give us a bit of background. Can you hear me? Yep. My thesis was about using remote sensing to report SDG sustainable development goals. And I although I downloaded spatial maps from WAPOR but I could only use QGIS to show the information because data on its own even if it's available and accessible do not you cannot do anything with it you have to transform it and because of GIS. There's the issue with our internet connection for now. So while we wait for Celine to come back I'd like to actually ask a little bit about the publishing of the second edition of this book. So I think I'll hop over to Tyler. Sure. Gary, I think it's for both of you. How did Locate Press come about? I see it's very much for open source geospatial books. And I want to know how it came about how it all started. Yeah, really I think I started just a little bit before we launched Gary's book was our first book that we launched there the geospatial desktop. Both him and I had published books as authors before I published through O'Reilly and he published through Pragmatic Press and both of our books actually went out of print and we couldn't get our copyright back and that fell really bad. And so we decided to start a company that made basically brought the open source geospatial market into being for books. There was a couple publishers that little books here and there. But we really wanted to focus on it. I knew through my work with OSGO and just my professional GIS career that not a lot of people knew these tools existed. So QGIS included, but even stuff like PostGIS and others. So that was the impetus for really investigating the potential in this market as a small business to help bring knowledge kind of to the foreground. So we were able to, Gary can talk more about his book and what we did for it. But that really kicked off and kind of proved the concept that people were interested in learning more and having more knowledge kind of brought to the surface for them through books. And originally we were just focused on print books, did some Kindle a little bit and now we do primarily digital PDF prints or PDF ebooks. But yeah, it was really the open source geospatial markets changed a little bit. But there's still not a lot of marketing money behind these open source projects. And so we're doing our part to help kind of raise that awareness. Fantastic. Perhaps Gary could speak to this or both of you, I can see you both published. I know people watching this are kind of, you know, thinking, well, I have expertise in QGIS or open source software is at Fosco G software. How does publishing with location locate press work? Is it idea of sort of from an idea to a book? How do we go through that publishing process? Yeah, sure. The we're trying to make the process as simple as possible because we know that a lot of people who maybe are have the knowledge aren't see themselves as technical writers. So we're actually we're working on new series of books to that are smaller so that new writers can get started with writing a couple chapters at a time and not dedicate, you know, all their evenings for the next year and a half to writing content. Been there, done that by the way. And the the other aspect to this too is that we haven't done a lot of domain specific books. We've looked at a lot of technology and this book that we're talking about today is really the most domain specific kind of level of expertise that, although it's useful for learning QGIS in general, it really is focused on a specific type of user. And we want we need more of these books. So we actually are I won't say desperate for content because we're also we're also bottlenecked by resources. But anyone who has, you know, expertise in specific areas, whether it's, you know, forestry, mining, you know, planning, urban design, whatever, we will definitely discuss it. We don't have an onerous thing. We jump on a call and chat about it, get an outline and then go forward from there. Perhaps for the in the possible G conference coming up, we can keep an eye out for some, you know, presentations or workshops that would make a decent book. That's great. Yeah, no, absolutely. I then wanted to just ask what you mentioned that Gary obviously was part of the locate press. What are your plans with the publishing platform. My plans. I'm basically, I'm basically Tyler's henchman I do what he what he wants and so I'm actually have written a series of fiction books I'm doing that I don't current I have currently one book in maybe revision for for locate press but I'm not real haven't been pursuing it real vigorously, but you won't use the word retire in any of this discussion, by the way. Yeah, I'm retired so one of the neat things I think I'll just say about locate press for anybody who's thinking about writing. Hopefully the authors won't shake their head no but we have a set of tools that allow us to publish both digital and hard copy from one source. And, and it's not like writing a book in in word, all the indexing and the table of contents and a figure cross references and all that are generated. It takes a little bit of work but in the long run it's worth it from the publishing standpoint, compared to trying to do it all by hand so. And we in the past and still provide guidance in that and do a lot of background work, but that. So you know that's if you're writing a book from scratch but we've also we back when I was officially part of it done books that have been already completely written in another form like say a workshop content or another training course and and take that and convert and publish it so those are both options for for Tyler to to get your book out and print and digital. Should should just mention real quick to one of the other founding principles that we've operated on is higher much a royalty rate than other publishers give. So not to make too much of a sales pitch but come and join us we're small publisher we don't sell. We don't sell 10s of 1000s of books a year, but we do offer 5050% royalties as opposed to the piddly 10% that we've gotten our books before locate press was around, which was really nice to get $1 50 on a $40 book. But so keep that in mind for anybody who's interested. We have a much different model which I'm happy to dive into in a phone call somebody. 10% I got 1.5% with pack publishing. Sorry. My goodness. Yeah. Sorry. Oh my goodness. Alrighty, I'm going to bring us back I would of course I'm going to bring us to what other books we can publish etc. Q just for hydrological applications second edition for now. And I just wanted to ask Hans. What is your experience of using the book in class as teaching material. Well, we just had that question a bit. I'm sorry. Yeah, to use it in class I think it's really for the domain specialist that hydrologist is really useful. I think for people who study it themselves as a problem based approach it works but I think for other people who teach it in class Kurtz book might be a lot better because that's more generic so at universities where they teach GIS as a generic topic. I'm not specific for a domain I think Kurtz book at locate press is a much better option. Alright, so then Kurtz book tell us about that tell us about your book that's coming up. Let's get into the shameless plug territory a little bit. So, I, in 2019 published this this beast, discover QGIS 3x, which is a 400 page workbook for classroom or independent study, and it's a pretty thorough treatment of all the features in QGIS. And sorry, QGIS in Denmark they say QGIS and, and, you know, I moved to Denmark in the middle of the pandemic and I'm learning Danish and so I'm learning how to pronounce QGIS in a different way here too. I go back and forth. But the updated book I've been working on since Hans and I finished the edits to the QGIS Hydro book so for the last three months on weekends I've been working on the second edition of discover QGIS 3x. And it has five parts it goes, it starts out with the basics of how to what what are even starts kind of about what you're teaching the basic of QGIS with data models and file formats and projections and how to add data. And it goes through spatial analysis, data management cartography and then into advanced data visualization at the end. So the new book is going to be a big improvement it goes through and has five no seven new chapters in the new book it's a major new release it's going to be updated to just about QGIS 326. And it's going to include some nice things like field data collection that weren't in the first book raster data analysis, working with the style manager, working with point clouds. So it has a lot of a lot of the latest and greatest features in QGIS, plus updates to all the material that was there before. Fantastic so discover is kind of your more everybody wants to come and have a look book for everyone who's starting to sort of go into open source software and using QGIS, whereas QGIS for hydrological is very much more specialized. Fantastic. Alrighty, so Hans I wanted to actually ask you about what the GIS hydro book fund is. Can you explain a bit because I've seen a bit about it, but can you give me all the background info on it. Yeah, sure well I can connect to tighter statement that the royalties are quite fair for the authors. So 50% goes to the authors and we are two authors so my 25% share doesn't go to me, but I have a fund hosted at IHC Delft so the money is transferred to IHC Delft. And there's a project number that I can manage. And the idea of the fund is to, well it's astonishing always when we see who are at Phosphor G and QGIS events and they're mostly people from the global north from Europe and from US and Canada. Mostly male, many of my age and a bit older. So we miss a big group of young people from the global south and also mostly female. So I thought what could I do about that and of course I work in a very nice international institute, IHC Institute for Water Education. Now in Delft where we have students from all over the world and especially from the global south studying everything related to water. And the fund addresses these students so they can apply for the fund. So whenever there's an event like Phosphor G then I'll ask around if somebody is doing something with QGIS because that's one condition. You need to come from the global south, you need to preferably be female and do something nice with QGIS either for your master thesis or other type of research. And then you get the full package. So you can join the QGIS contributor meeting related to the Phosphor G, you join the Phosphor G and if we have the Phosphor G Netherlands then you can also join that and we'll cover all the expenses. That's basically it and Natalia knows everything about it because she was our first QGIS Hydro Book Fund alumnus. I was just about to ask. I know of course I've spoken to Natalia before about her web plugin and I wanted to ask you what did you do with your Hydro Book Fund for your time? Okay so as Hans mentioned in that time I was an IHC Delft student. So in the same time that the application for the Phosphor G Buenos Aires came I was just finishing my master and I also just participated in the Whopper Hackathon that we were one of the winner teams. So yeah Hans just presented me this idea and it was really cool because it's a really good opportunity to show like the project and unfortunately due to COVID we couldn't go there to Buenos Aires. But still with the book fund I could participate online. It was pretty nice. I just show my project and I present. I also attend to several of the presentations and see cool stuff related to the open source EIS world. So it was really nice and then last year also on October if I'm not drunk was the Phosphor E&L. So I'm living in the Netherlands. So it was also a good opportunity to participate and be more like in touch and interact more because now it was possible and it was pretty nice. Like I really meet really nice people also introduced me more in the open source EIS world. That is amazing. I saw the presentation also of Kirk really nice features in QIES and the next versions and releases. So it was really nice and a good opportunity as also Hans said like we don't see many participation of young female women from other countries and more in the Phosphor E&L. So it was also a good starting I think for the QIES fund and I'm pretty grateful and glad to be participating in all these things. That's brilliant. For those of us watching who don't know what the WAP or Water Accounting Productivity Plugin is. Can you explain the plug into us and how it's going? How's it going? I caught up with you a couple of months ago on it so please let me know. And actually we have like some like new things and that happened like a few months back. So the WAP Plugin as you say is the Water Accounting Productivity Plugin that we developed after winning the WAP or Hackathon that was done like December 2020, if I'm not wrong. And this project wanted just to connect it like for those that don't know about the WAP or a platform. It's a platform that is from FAO and that provides data for WAP or productivity purposes. So different kind of maps and is mainly for Africa and Middle East. And so what we wanted is to just bring the data from WAP or to QIES for those users that are also a EIS users and bring it with this plugin that will just reduce the time like the time that takes to download the data and also process it in an easier way. And plus it has a feature for a calculated where accounting and productivity indicators. So that's the WAP Plugin and two months ago we released the version two that has like a lot of updates and it's easier to use. And yeah, we also had a live with hands. We were explaining all these new features. So yeah, this is more or less the project. Oh, that's brilliant. Are there any plans for the future of the project? What are you currently doing? Are you going to do a presentation at Pospogee? I was not. We were like not planning much. We went after releasing the version two that took a lot of effort. We were like, we stopped for a while, but I think that the plans are keeping proven it and maybe with us version or next version. But yeah, I was, I don't know if we were going to participate, but maybe for E&L again. Brilliant stuff. Brilliant stuff. All righty. Celine, hopefully your connection holds out. I wanted to circle back to you because you're in the middle of your sentence. And we were just talking about having online classes and your experience of using the hydrological book in class. Yes. And I was saying I was also using it as a tutorial in my thesis as well because you could always go back to it. On the tutorials, they were very detailed and you can self-learn it and on your own base, which is very important. And also thanks to this book fund, I will go to the phosphor G event in Italy. So I'm so excited about it. Also to meet all the people behind all this work and basically working as volunteers. And I'm also happy because also in Lebanon, we are starting as a small open map community, which is also interesting to use this in Lebanon because we have big data gap. We can also use this to be an added value. Because before coming to the Netherlands, I had no idea about all this. So it's a very interesting exposure for me specifically to go and meet all these people and learn from them, hopefully. And hopefully next year I will be interviewed and I will tell you what I learned during this seminar or conference. Let's make it a date. I wanted to ask what your presentation for phosphor G is. Yes, I will have a small talk for five minutes about my research and how I use QGIS to actually monitor one of the sustainable development goals because I used raster maps and I use also QGIS with grass. I used all the zonal statistics report r series in order to show the spatial variability and temporal variability of water use efficiency in Lebanon. But also the tool I use can be expanded into other countries. You can use the same workflow I used. I will create a Python Jupyter notebook using Python so anyone can use it in any other country. And hopefully I will do that by the end of August I will be done with this so I will present it in the conference. Fantastic. And as someone relatively new on the scene of using the software, what is your main motivation for using open source software? Why was it attractive to you for your project? I'm sorry I didn't hear you. Sorry. I wanted to ask what your motivation for using open source software was for your project? No, last. Alrighty. So then I'm going to move over to the Enhance. And I wanted to ask you, you have your own company. I wanted to ask why you're still with IHE Delft? What's your motivation for still being involved? Well, IHE Delft is my main job. So I still keep doing the same stuff that I was doing, the 40 hours per week that I spend at IHE Delft and teach to students, do projects, capacity development, things that we stand for, to solve water problems in the world. But I felt that I needed a bit of my own space to go a bit beyond what we do with IHE Delft. I often get questions through my YouTube channel or through social media, where people are stuck with either things from the book or with the videos they watch or tutorials they find on GIS OpenCourseWare, the platform where we have free courses. And if I would like to provide help to individuals and you have to go through the whole administration of a big organization like IHE Delft, then it takes a lot of time and also the rates will be high and probably when you're at the end of the process, the person is maybe not interested anymore. So I wanted to do something in the middle way, which also gives me a lot of freedom to choose the things that I like. Of course, in the Netherlands, I don't know in other places, but we need permissions from our employer to do these things. So I followed, of course, the official route. And funnily, it was in the national news that many people don't follow that route. It was exactly at that moment when I submitted my request for having my own company. So at that timing, all these professors who work for oil companies do weird things. But I'm very ethical in these things and I don't think I do anything that is bad for IHE or for anybody. So I said IHE Delft focuses on the global south, low and mid-income countries. I focus mostly on high-income countries. I do more than only water for my company. I don't work with donors. Donors should always go to IHE Delft. We are experienced in working with donors and contracting and all the gritty of the budget things. So I want to have an easy life with my company and not get into that. There's some regulation in the Netherlands that if you are below 20,000 euros turnover, you don't have to deal with VAT stuff. So I applied for that, which I also used as an argument that it would not interfere with my 40 hours a week that I have to spend at IHE Delft. So all these arguments make it very complementary. And I also think that when I help people with my own company, the materials that I developed for that can also be used in teaching at IHE Delft. So there's a clearly a win-win situation. And I already have one client. He's somebody who works with farms and tries to find good soils and uses all the techniques that you can also learn from the book and many more techniques with outsourced software to find out which places are which ground is good to buy and to start a farm. So a very nice experience collaborating with the client like this. Fantastic. Alrighty. Before we go to a couple of the YouTube comments, I do encourage everybody who's watching at home, please ask your questions for this awesome panel in the YouTube live chat. We will be asking those in just a moment. I wanted to finish off by asking Tyler, Tyler and Gary, what books can we expect to come from Locate Press this year? Obviously, the Discover book is coming out, which I'm super excited about. But what can we expect to come to becoming soon? Yeah, we're working with Qixiang Mu on a book covering his GMAP and Earth Engine topics. So for any of you that are following his tutorials online, you should check those out if you haven't on YouTube. And that's our next book in the queue. We have books covering more on Python and geospatial analytics. And we have more on, oddly enough, Python and maps. Let's just say Python maps. And that's what I'll say about it for now. But we've got three or four books in the queue that we're working on. And we'll be hopefully getting those out once a month or so going forward for the rest of the year. Again, these are kind of smaller format books, just primarily eBooks. And they'll be a lower price point, but they'll also really be highly focused on very specific use cases. And are the books all recipe style, sort of step-by-step tutorial style, as like the hydrological book, are some of them more theory-based? What are they going to look like? Yeah, most of them are going to be tutorial-based. We are working on one in particular, though that is looking... I want to move more into the business of GIS as well. So we are working on one title that is more of a background or on kind of personal journeys of how to get into developing consultancy or building your career on top of open source tools versus non-open source tools and the challenges people typically go through. So that one will be a little bit of a different one. We'll test to see if people are interested in that kind of narrative. So tutorials, quick starts, get started quickly. Do one thing well, those are all definitely where we're headed. I'm sure someone like Natalia would actually be interested in that sort of thing. Getting started on open source. What are you currently doing? I know you've finished with your studying, what's your current job and how would a book like that help you? Regarding how the book will help me, when Tyler was talking I was like, okay, I need that book because we are starting with our tool and also the GIS keep working on it but also earning it or something to just make the work paid off because there's a lot of work and it's still open for everyone. So it will be really cool and really nice. My current job, actually currently I'm working in a Dutch company called Elif that also is focused on developing some products for water, irrigation, crop production based on satellite data. So I'm pretty related to thermal sensing and of course we use like softwares like Kujayes and of course Ozeo, of course Yidal. So all of these things and cool books like Python and how to do the statics and all these things is something that I would like to have. Absolutely, those are very exciting publications. I'm very keen. We have a reviewer ready now, so it's good. Brilliant stuff. Alright, I'm just having a look at the time and I think perhaps it's time for a couple of live questions from YouTube. What do you think, Hans? Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I see a question from Craig Price and I put it on the screen here but Craig Price, we are very thankful to him because he wrote the foreword for the second edition and we chose Craig because Kurt and I have worked with the Australian Water School and Craig was hosting these sessions and we developed the courses together with Craig and he wrote a really nice foreword for us in the second edition. So thank you, Craig. Absolutely. Can you smash that group again, Hans? Because I know that there are several good videos out as well from Craig's team. Yes, the Australian Water School really produces great learning stuff especially for people in hydrology, because it's the water school. So it's surface water, groundwater modeling with HEC-RAS, for example. We just had a former colleague of mine from Utrecht University delivering a course for the water school and was also very happy with the cooperation. So you can check out their website to find also on-demand courses. And yeah, I think it's worth it to follow them also on YouTube and subscribe to their newsletter. I see Craig cheekily said thanks for the plug, Hans. I'll just read out his question for those of us. So Craig asks, in addition to well-mapping, are there resources covering hydrological applications or can we look forward to a future companion volume on groundwater to supplement the surface water applications? It's a good question from Craig. We developed a course for the Australian Water School and that course for Australian Water School was developed by Curt and me specifically on groundwater applications. And there are bits and pieces on the GIS OpenCourseWare platform implemented also for iGRAC, the UN Institute for Groundwater. And that's all open courseware. But there is no specific book or complete elaborate course yet on groundwater. It would be an idea and we can always of course discuss with the local press and have other experts on board if that would be a good niche to also have a book about. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And stop. Shall we move on to Pedro's question? Quite interesting. Yeah, if I can find it. Is it somewhere up? Yeah, it's just a little bit up from Craig Price's. So, Pedro asks specifically for LocatePress, does LocatePress offer subscriptions to books slash content so that one who has already purchased an earlier version can access later additions? No, we don't specifically have that kind of arrangement and I can confidently say we're working towards something more like that. In fact, it's been recognized. I'm trying to not share too much before I actually have something to show, but it's been recognized that the online reading experience as whether it's part of courseware or whether it's more of like a Kindle-like experience or a subscription-based service that gives you access to all of our titles on a monthly rate or something like that is very high on our agenda. So Gary knows what he's going to be programming next. The idea that when you're a customer and you're stuck with us this long, we really want to make sure you also get the discounts early on too to the updates. If it's a minor update or we're fixing a Rata and we do do that regularly, you always get updates. You have to go in and regenerate a copy of your PDF. So those ones are not an issue. But we also, it's important they sign up for our newsletter so that we can share discount codes with you directly because it's almost all entirely customers on our newsletter. So there's a few ways that you can kind of get the deals right now and I've put some coupon codes in the chat. But there are future changes coming that will kind of give us yet another way to engage over the long term with people who want to read more content and potentially reduce their costs or at least have some flexibility. That's actually going to be a really interesting platform we're going to work on. That sounds so exciting. I'm keen to see. Perhaps later on in the year, we can do another one of these and catch up with where it's at. Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be awesome. I see Hunts is winning our viewers award for best map frames and background. So congratulations. In fact, these are sound absorbing panels. There's some acoustics here in this room and it absorbs the sound, but it's also very nice to look at. Probably it's better for the looks than absorbing the sound, but anyways. I better out my game. All right. So let me see. We have another question from Cracert or Crackert. Sorry if I'm butchering that. Hunts, what argument prompted you to create the PC ruster plugin instead of using grass ruster hydro modules? Yes, it's also been related to the question earlier from Natalia. So I think the great advantage of open source is that you have alternatives and many of these alternatives do things in a similar way, but some are more robust than the others or some have their specific formats. So people choose that mostly based on what they're used to. So it's very hard to get people into another product, I think, but there have been a few arguments, especially compared to Saga, which was used in the first edition. So Saga and grass are processing provider plugins, which have been traditionally installed together with QGIS. And in the future, this is going to change and these changes are already being made slowly. So in the newer editions, you need to do often a few more steps to get Saga and grass in your processing toolbox. And there's a specific problem with Saga. They've upgraded Saga from the LTR version that was always used until 3.16.4 or something. After that version of QGIS, they decided to upgrade for QGIS to Saga 7.x, 7.8, I think. But that broke a few of the essential things that we need for QGIS for hydrological applications first edition. The upslope area tool is not working anymore. And basically, there are two workarounds on my YouTube channel. You can install the old dependencies, QGIS with the old dependencies, or you can edit the so-called descriptor files. That's a piece of human-readable text file that you can edit in a text editor and you just need to change some value from 0 to 1 or something. It's that easy. But for simple users, those things are already big steps and you often bump into problems of having not write permissions where you change that file. So a lot of complications. So I thought, okay, if in the future, it is as easy to install any processing provider plugin as if you have access to grass and Saga, then we have a level playing field. And PC Raster, I grew a bit up with that at Utef University in the Netherlands where I studied and did my PhD. And it has been developed there. The group with one of the... Well, talking about books, I think the first person who wrote a book on GIS, Professor Peter Burrow from Oxford University. He worked at Utef University. I've worked with him. And that tool was quite old from somewhere in the 90s, 95, I think, but it's very robust and it's maintained and it's open source and it has Python bindings. So that's very useful. And grass is, I think, the oldest in this whole series of tools. And I see all these things as complementary. So my YouTube channel, you will find the procedures with grass, with Saga, with white box tools and with PC Raster. So just see this as a continuum of doing the same workflow with a different set of tools. Although I think that the PC Raster tools are a bit more intuitive and robust than the others. And as a teacher, as a lecturer, I would say I prefer small building blocks for the learning process than have the whole catching delineation behind one button because then you don't know if you change tools. What happens? So that's a bit of a philosophy. Building blocks are much better than you connect the dots and if you later build it yourself into a graphical model or into a Python script, that's okay. But at least you need to learn these procedures at the building blocks and trying them out. And I think QGIS has a great opportunity for that with all these tools in the processing toolbox. Brilliant stuff. Thank you for your end of answer. That was great. I see that Tyler is actually answering some of the questions as we speak. And we are running a little low on time. So Hans, I think we may have space for one more live question. And then I think I should hand over to you to sort of shape things up. That's good. I'm not sure if I see any question. Do you see any question that is relevant? Put it on the screen. Maybe you could talk about supplying academic material for people who are in leading classes. Would that be helpful? Because Leah asks here. Yeah, exactly there. So we do supply a lot of books to university courses and you can always buy books through Amazon. You can always buy books through the PDF books through our website. But the best deals that you'll get, especially on bulk print orders will be directly through us. So you can email me, Tyler at lowkeypress.com and we'll set up a bulk order for you and you'll get the best rates that way. It's especially important too to try to line it up so maybe your library can order the books directly from the actual printing company and distributors that we use. Then all of us are kind of out of the loop and libraries can do their thing and are your campus bookstores. So both this book and Kurt's book are used in a lot of courses. So that's great to hear. I'd love to hear your story. Please email me your needs and tell me more about what you're doing. Because that is one of the primary goals of the company is to support training and whether it's private consulting trainers or academics, they're both equally valuable to us and of interest to us to support. Brilliant. Thank you, Lea. Thank you so much. It's great to see the books being used in a practical environment. I think that's amazing. I think that's what all the authors want to see if I'm not wrong. Yeah. Fantastic. I think that's a great segue to thanking the authors and publishers and handing over to Hans to finish off the session. Yes. Before we have this session we have a few shameless plugs. We already introduced a few but let's look at this. So where can you find us in the near future? If you want to meet some of us. So Kurt and I and Celine at least will be joining Phosphor G in Florence and Amy, you too. Great. Love to see you live. Thanks. So I will be presenting there or hosting a workshop on the PC Raster for Hydrology using QGIS and Python. You can register at the website. Kurt will tell later a bit about his presentation. And next week if everything goes well I'll be joining the Living Planet Symposium organized by ESA. I won a project together with a partner from Benin in the ESA R&D facility, EO Africa R&D facility and we are going to present our plans to develop a lake monitoring system using satellite images and their infrastructure to do the calculation and processing of satellite data. Then there are some upcoming courses at IHE Delft, face to face courses. Of course always change if Covid comes back but let's hope that doesn't happen. The first and most important one is the one that I organized together with Kurt. QGIS for hydrological applications and if you join that course you will receive the book. We'll use the book and actually complete the course you will receive the official QGIS certificate which contributes 20 euros to the development of QGIS. It's a great thing to have and also for us as an institute IHE Delft to contribute to QGIS. There might be people here who need scholarships then you could go for the two week courses and on the website of IHE Delft you can find different scholarship opportunities if you're from the global south from certain countries there are different opportunities. So these courses that start with data acquisition the last three courses there are two weeks and the first week is QGIS for hydrological applications with Kurt and me and the second week you dive into either Hecarus or Swat or Python so that could be also one that's interesting for you. For this year you can't get the scholarships anymore but for next year you can apply for it. Give the floor to Kurt for his shameless plugs. Thanks Hans. So just yesterday I uploaded to the QGIS style repository a series of kind of outdoor life icons, outdoor recreation icons it's a series of 120 that you can go and download and bring into QGIS now. So next and I do have a series of courses coming up that I've developed here at Septima this one is data visualization with QGIS in which I go through print layout tricks layer effects blending modes cartographic effects for coastlines expression based symbology including geometry generators using the temporal controller to create temporal animations using the 3D viewer with some of the new enhancements to it and then finishing up with weather related mesh data which also incorporates the temporal controller and all these courses I'm going through you can go to the next slide Hans they all also come with QGIS certificate so the other course I've developed is raster data and analysis with QGIS all of these are online courses so they can be taken from anywhere in this one you're identifying potential vineyards using terrain land cover and soils data and through the course you go through a whole set of useful steps that could be used for really any raster analysis such as how to use the raster calculator in different ways next the one I just finished developing is one on data collection using QGIS and merchant maps so this is a shorter course it's just a two hour session with an hour follow up and I give you an assignment and this is a fantastic suite of tools if you have not used merchant maps I'm a big fan and I encourage you to explore it and I've already talked about the next second edition of discover QGIS 3H but these slides go through some of the specifics I didn't mention that the book every chapter includes solution files so you can go and open up the final QGIS project to see the result you can answer discussion questions and then there's challenge assignments which give you an opportunity to go through the same workflow on a different set of data so that it kind of make sure that you can actually accomplish that workflow without following the step-by-step instructions and the book has 31 chapters all the exercises have been updated and there'll be current to QGIS 326 there's new graphics there's seven new chapters including the raster data analysis chapter field data collection using the style manager and working with legend pet shapes automating print layouts with templates and atlases working with labels and annotation so the new annotation tools animating data with the temporal controller and working with point cloud data and even in some of the older chapters there's new tasks such as computing network isochrones geocoding using the new nominatum geocoding services built into QGIS using layer notes which is one of these new features that's overlooked and then creating elevation profiles which is something that's just out in the nightly releases now that's a really exciting new feature and this is the talk that I'll be giving in at Phosphor G in Italy I'll be talking about QGIS feature frenzy what's new in the last year so I'm kind of giving the latest and greatest of QGIS features in France definitely worth watching that and I think there was the last slide but I think there's another shameless plug and that one is from Amy I think on the QGIS Open Day do you want to say something Amy is your chance to do a shameless plug on that one? Oh no, absolutely I would love to do a plug on the QGIS Open Day so for everyone who's watching monthly on the last Friday of every month we have the QGIS Open Day platform where we basically meet up in an open room with someone who has a question someone who has a new plugin someone who has an awesome workflow that they use QGIS to do and the next one is on the 27th May which is next week so please join and we have some amazing talks we have our friends from Lutra coming to show us some data analysis with point clouds and we also have a really interesting PhD candidate from the UK who is using satellite imagery to assess sea health and also look at mass whale strandings and she actually put out to the community that she needs help to do this she really wants to use QGIS in order to do this and she needs to know more about how to analyse space generally roster data but also her satellite imagery so she'd love whoever is a a user slash expert in imagery to be in that call and give her some advice so yeah please join in on any QGIS Open Day that you would like to and if you'd like to give a session at any point please pop over to the QGIS wiki page it's on the QGIS Twitter it's on Facebook it's on every social media you can think of and join in I encourage you to do so great yes always fun these QGIS Open Days and learning a lot and exchanging with others anyone else wants to plug something or some final words before we close off we would definitely want to do more webinars so you're inspiring me to check these out better we have for example a lot of educators that are authors at LocatePress time hasn't permitted it yet but we're going to have an education breakout panel group with 5 to 8 academics on our panel talking about how to integrate Open Source GIS into your coursework so a lot of academics don't necessarily know the next steps so the resources that are available and at least Curt and Hodze have learned through the fire and figured it out so we'll sign up for the newsletter and we'll let you know when that happens and I'd like to take this opportunity with Gary and Tyler here to thank you both for all the support in all the books I've published with LocatePress and I can recommend LocatePress to other authors. I've had a great experience with LocatePress I'm a big fan and so if you're interested in writing a book on a cool topic using Open Source GIS yeah, contact Tyler yeah, Steven, thanks Curt as an author I can only endorse what Curt is saying and really nice to work with all of you fantastic that you joined this live session too and get the word out of what we are doing I think that's great thanks Gary, thanks Tyler thanks Natalia and Celine, I hope you still enjoy a lot the book fund stuff that we're doing thanks Curt for writing with you and thanks Amy for doing this session with us it was really great to have such a good interviewer that can ask us all these nice questions that I was watching and also thanks for your questions and I really hope you enjoy our work and our books and hope to see also back in the future I'm going to close off thank you all, bye bye thanks a lot thanks everyone