 In this video we are going to look at open data that is available in the French geoportals and geoservices. We're going to delineate the catchment of our study area, add open data and prepare field maps. So here we are at the geoportal of the French government and we can look for a study area which is close to Dignes-les-Bains in this example and it gives us aerial photographs and maps, boundaries and there are other thematic data available. So this gives an idea on what data is available, but it doesn't give us the data to be used in a GIS, so we need to find another way to download this. It needs a bit of googling around, but another keyword you can often use is geoservice. And if I google IGN geoservices I end up on this page where the web services from the government are available. And maybe you remember from the open data lessons that there are different web services. There's WMS, web map service, which just gives a picture and that's what we have here for aerial photographs and for maps. There's WFS which is for the vector data, there's WCS which is to get the real raster data. This site is quite complete, but in French it comes with tutorials and a lot of information. But by now we should understand that we can just simply copy this link to the WMS and use that in QGIS. So there's WMS, the browser panel where it can make a new connection, can give it any name. This one is called Decouvert, they have different levels with different names, so let's do that so we are not confused later when we add other ones, paste the link, click OK, and then I can expand, clicking the triangle and then when I drag it to the map canvas it will give me the data, it shows now the whole world, but I'm interested in where the fieldwork is located near Dignia Laban so I'm going to install the geocoding plugin and that adds this little button and there you can add the name of a place or a street name or a full address even and here I can find Dignia Laban, it's a dot here on the map and when I zoom in it will get that aerial photograph information from the web service and we see that it's quite detailed, they've blocked out a part there of the city but most of the area is there and we can even find a camping where we can stay during the fieldwork. But this data is still online and it comes in WMS tiles, it's quite efficient and we can also add a topographical map in the same way and we see that when we zoom in it gives us more detailed maps so the scale depends on the zoom level. Let's see what other web services are available, there's essential which gives us access to some other layers, some vector and raster data available there but not exactly what I need, so we're looking for administrative boundaries and maybe they're under experts and I see they're administrative and in different formats but I want the vector data so therefore I'm going to look for WFS, I copy this link so it's good to read those pages to see what all the data is about, I'm going to make a new connection, give it a new name it's called expert so let's call it IGN expert, expand that section and now it loads from the web and there we see what layers are available so there's the different administrative levels in France, the arrondissement, the commune and the département and due to a little bug I just added to a fresh project otherwise it doesn't overlap for some reason with aerial photographs, I'm not sure why that happens but here you see it loads and it also has some areas not located in Europe in the same way as we did before I can look for Dinje and there it is so here we see the département level, now let's add the commune which is more like municipality and when you have data from the National Mapping Agency you're quite sure that that's the most accurate and up-to-date one and these are the arrondissement, now let's assume that we want to work within this boundary of the arrondissement and I can export the arrondissement that we need, make sure we choose the one that Dinje is in and I can create a selection and I can create a selection so make sure that the right layer is selected and then I can export the selected feature and it's good to build up our database so I made a new folder fieldwork and I'm going to make a new database which is the geo-package so all our layers will be there in the end and the name of the layer is arrondissement and I'm going to change the projection here to what we're going to use in this project and this is in UTM zone 32 north and when I click OK it will create a copy of that selection in the database and then I remove the other layers and that's what we can then further use in our project so remember that from these geo-portals or geo-services you can get access to the data if it's a WMS it is a picture rendered from vector or raster data which you can use as a backdrop if it's WFS but feature service then it is a vector layer which you can then export to a GIS file to a geo-package or to a shape file and there is the WCS which will give you the raster data from the server and you can export that to a geo-tiff for example besides using administrative boundaries we can also derive the catchments from a digital elevation model we can download here from the geo-services website a digital elevation model that can be used for that and there are different DM products so you need to look a bit around to find the correct one we're looking for very detailed ones and the name of that product is the RGLT and it's available at 1 meter or 5 meter spatial resolution for the delineation of catchments the 5 meter resolution is sufficient if you click the link you can see that it's divided per department and our study area is in department 4 Alpe d'Aute Provence it's an FTP link we can copy the link and paste it in filezilla it's open source software for accessing FTP servers just simply paste it at host and it fills the content in the correct fields I connect to the server of EJN and on the right side you see the server on the left side you are a local disk and we see it has a lot of data so we need to figure out what we need because this is basically everything there's this first zip file with the mosaic cache which means the the tiles and that sounds useful to have if I double click it will download to the folder that I have on the left side so I can extract the file and the part for France the shake files over there so that's the only one I need the other ones are not in Europe and save it to a folder which is for the 5 meter this one department 4 and that's the file name given on the website on the left if I double click it will download to the fieldwork folder that I have on the left side now after downloading I can open the zip file and extract the part that I need and these are ASCII grids it's a raster format and I'm going to just extract this whole folder and later we need to figure out which tiles we need okay now let's see if we can get it in QGIS first we need to locate our catchment area roughly so I'm going to install the quick map services plugin and I have the name of the river it's called the Claret and should be near Dignia Labin so with the quick map services I changed the settings so I can see more services choose the tab more services get contributed pack click save and then we have a longer list here but we start with open street map and can use the geocoding plugin to find Dignia and I know the catchment is a little bit north near Labin and open street map doesn't have all the smaller rivers so I go to Google hybrid and there I see Ravenne de Claret and that's the river for which I want the catchment because I'm going to study that catchment with Google terrain I can also get a bit more information about the relief shading and I see there clearly the river I use that to get the approximate extent for which I want to have those DEM tiles those are the DEM tiles but we also have that file with all the tiles in the shape file that will help us to find the numbers of those tiles that we need we can give them a label so we can see those numbers and we need to make sure that the label fits nicely in the square and this has to do with the font size I'm going to change that let's try 7 yes now it fits so I'm going to try and find those tiles this is the file for the 1 meter but these numbers correspond approximately with the 5 meter so probably there's also a file for the 5 meter but I didn't find that and you have to look at those numbers so 955, 956 that's all we need and that also corresponds with the coordinates that you see in the coordinate field so this is a bit of finding out which are the ones and then we can merge the tiles into a geotiff in a miscellaneous choose merge select the four tiles choose an output file name save it to our fieldwork folder let's remove what we don't need and there we see a question mark at the projection so let's figure out what projection is used here and there must be somewhere some metadata so I'm going to look about it okay I see documentation let's click that button and there's html format metadata and then there's projection information rgf 93 lumber 93 rgn 69 let's see if we can find it I simply copy that and paste it in google and then via the website epsg.io I can find the epsg code which is 2154 let's use that 2154 click okay and indeed we see now that the dm shows up in the right spot that project also does not have the correct projection so we can say set projects here as from layer and now we're all set now we can follow the rest of the procedure of catchment delineation we need to fill the things I use Wang and Liu you can ignore the warning keep the default here save the output dm filled but it's done assign the projection and the next step is to calculate the strahler order and there's a nice result let's visualize it in palleted unique values use blues and we need to select the correct streams and we do that with the raster calculator choose strahler larger equal than a value and let's do five you need to calibrate this value you can change here the output projection change the styling and then you can visualize the streams as blue I remove the zero to make zeros transparent with the streams we can check how well that fits for the calibration now I'm just going to go with this and we see here on the map that the delineated river is not exactly at the place of the bridge this probably a place where you want to put a diver to measure the discharge but for the catchment delineation it is better to go a bit downstream where it enters the bigger river I copy the coordinate of the outlet therefore it's very important that you make sure it's in the correct projection the same as the dm make sure that you choose the field dm and save it as catchment and there's the result set the projection and convert it to a polygon because we want the boundary as a polygon set the projection value hundred is our catchment so I'm going to invert the selection and delete the outside so we only have the catchment polygon and there it is I just need to do some finishing touches with the styling just a simple outline change the color make it a bit bigger and there's our catchment boundary so the delineation of our study area I'm going to make the dm a bit smaller I'm going to clip it to the canvas extent just to save some space because we want to take it with us a field share it with our teammates maybe I want some context so I don't clip it strictly to the boundary and then we can derive the channels using the channel network and drainage basin tool use the clipped dm strainer threshold if you want flow direction you can keep it switch on and off what you want but for us the shapefile of the channels is important delineated stream is of course a bit rough so in the field you can verify it and trace it with the gps or digitize it from the remote sensing image gives an error but nothing went wrong we have a result set the projection and change the colors make invisible what we don't want to see let's style the dm single absolute color and the color ramp create a new color ramp choose a preset from cpt city or use something else that you like it's a property elevation I classify to apply it and we're going to duplicate the layer and do the trick with the hillshade blending we name this to hillshade and render it as hillshade now this changed the resampling and that looks really nice exaggerate it a little bit and blend it with the dm use multiply and there we see it also view it in the 3d view choose the dm and there it shows up and we can also add google hybrid to inspect our study area and we can increase the tile resolution to see more details we can play with these values now that we have the catchment boundary of our study area we can add more open data that is relevant for our study and we can style the data in a way that it can be printed later first i'm going to change the projection to utm because that's what we are going to use with the gps in the field and you can now check which zone because it gives a preview the purple cross shows where you are and the red rectangle shows which zone it is so we can find here that it's in zone 32 north and let's change a bit the styling so it will combine well with the open data for the catchment boundary we can use a so-called inverted polygon shape burst fill so we choose the inverted polygons and we change the sub renderer to shape burst fill and it's always nice to have it from gray to transparent white if we give rgb the same number it will be gray with a certain intensity and for white we choose a transparency so that will highlight the study area compared to the background play a bit with the distance and the blur strength let's also style the catchment it's continuous so we use single band pseudo color and we can use one of the presets from cpt city and i use here topography elevation click classify to apply it i'm going to uh duplicate the layer and rename it to hill shade because we do the trick of blending the colors of the dm with the hill shade so i use the hill shade renderer and need to change the resampling to linear to make it a bit smoother and then i can switch on the blending to uh multiply and this will give us the shading effect with the colors now what i miss is a sharp boundary of the catchment so i add another sub renderer so these are different layers and i add here black line i make it a bit thicker and let's make it red fine tune a bit now we also had online layers with the aerial photographs and we can see it here nicely with inverted polygon shabers filled the same with the topographical map it's useful to make separate groups of offline and online data it's just a bit to organize the layers panel here to create a group with online layers and another group with offline layers you can simply drag the layers and drop them into the group you can also select multiple and do that now we have our data arranged in the groups so let's go to the french geo services site and check what data is available in the catalog not all data is available for free but uh at least here we can get a nice overview if you click on one of these tiles you get more information most is of course in french so you need to figure a bit out what is useful for you there's scant topographical maps and those are not available for free but the vector data is available for free so we go to tailor charge one which means download and i can zoom into the study area and there's the bd topo shapefile product which gives us all the points lines and polygons of the topographical map and i simply download this it's a seven zip file seven zip is a very nice open source software for zipping you can download it for free from seven zip.org and i've opened here the zip file and i go there to the folder that i want to extract and donate that means data so that's the folder that i need and then sub folder and let's extract this one to the fieldwork folder back in qgis we see here the extracted folders and it's a lot of data it's just buildings are here reservoirs because we're going to focus on data that's useful for hydrological fieldwork and uh there are reservoirs but outside of our catchment but just to give you an idea of what this layer is we're going to look at the attribute table and there you see that these are water reservoirs or water towers and it might be quite useful but here you see a few points outside of our catchment so i don't need those i'm going to remove it then there's this folder hydrography which has basin version which means catchments and these are larger catchments than the ones that we delineate because we look at sub catchments but we can see here that they're part of a bigger catchment and in order to know which catchments are at the border we can label we use toponym for the names and here i see that in the west it is the la due catchment in the south la bléon and in the east la baisse cordeaux gives us the streams and to make them clearer i'm going to make them the darker blue than the delineated stream so we can see the difference we can see that these are bigger ones but they coincide quite well with the delineated stream you can add the names again with toponym use a text buffer to make it clearer you can use curved so it will be placed along the river and then there's this layer datae hydrography and if we're going to look at that one in the attribute table you can see that that's quite useful information about water points cisterns sources springs fountains that's useful for places where we want to sample water and learn more about the groundwater so we can style it with different colors for the categories or different symbols we could give them labels those are for the readability of the map we can give it a single symbol with a marker and we can choose for example an svg marker for example this blue symbol we need to change the size to make it more readable there's some other layers that you can explore there i'm going to look at troncon hydrographic which are the smaller streams and let's give them a blue dash you also see that that well quite well coincides with our delineated streams and in the attribute table we can see that they have classified in different types in an occupation diesel that's land cover we can look at vegetation types and these polygons have different classes so we can use categorized based on not too which is the type you can click classify they get random colors and we see that these are different forest types for example so to make them more intuitive we need to change the colors that's quite some work here i just do it quick and dirty by choosing a ramp that we'll do for now and under a layer rendering you can change also the blending to multiply and combine it with the hill shade there's some other data that might be interesting canonization but we don't see that in this study area so we'll move it under transport we can find the roads and paths in the study area and that's very useful if we want to plan our fieldwork because for every day you need to plan for what you're going to walk and where you're going to study the landscape and the water so let's change the colors a bit so these black lines are the paths so our catchment already looks quite useful like this for if we later make a map out of this with all these nice elements on it let's make the outline a bit more subtle so now all these different shape files and styles need to be packaged in one geo package we can do that with the package layers tool select all these vector layers it only works for vectors and we don't override the existing one but we add it to the existing geo package so choose save file choose our fieldwork database it still asks to replace it you just answer yes it will not replace it and it will add the layers to the geo package including all the styles let's now also save the project in the geo package project save to geo package there choose the file and give it a name you can save multiple projects in a geo package the only problem now is that these layers that we packaged are not in this project those are still shape files so we need to remove those vector layers and add the ones from the geo package that we just added they're not visible yet so you need to refresh now we see them and you see as we add them the styles are also there there they are make sure that the order of the layers is as you want it let's make these still a bit thicker don't want the labels and now we can save our project in the geo package and now all these layers are also referred to in the geo package except of course on bind layers and our raster layers which we can later drag in the geo package so we have a lot of layers and to make it easier to navigate we're going to make map themes with map themes we can show just a selection of layers so this is one for land cover i'm also going to make one for the dem but there's a nice feature to have contour lines which make it also easier in the field to interpret the geomorphology so i'm going to duplicate the layer again and this time i put it on top we name it two contours and they use the contours renderer here we already see the contour lines and i can play with these intervals and the index contour can have a different style as the ordinary contours i'm going to demonstrate this here i'm going to use 10 and 50 and the ones for 10 i make them a little bit transparent so those of 50 will be the thick black lines and that's quite nice to recognize the geomorphology here with all the valleys so create a new team call it elevation and also create themes for your online layers so one for the online topographic map and one for the aerial photographs here you can see how you can use those map themes to quickly show layers that you want to see what's still missing is a geological map and BRGM the geological survey of france has a nice website even in english where you can find the data so you go to BRGM on the web and then there's this info tear portal to access geoscientific data and have a look at that site for a lot of other data then i'm going to demonstrate i'm just going to show you how to get to the geological map and to add it to your QGIS project so there are these geoservices there's a lot of description here it supports these ogc standards in this table you see which services are available we're going to use this link and add it to the browser here new connection let's call it BRGM paste the link click okay expand it and there we see the geological map so we add it to the map canvas and there it loads so we can add another map theme and save the project if you want to have a local copy of online data you can do it in different ways one way is to export it to a georeference picture keep the defaults it will save everything in your map canvas to a georeference picture you can use png or you can use tiff if you use tiff it will be a geotiff and then you'll have a local copy of what you have in the map canvas but also at that resolution let's prepare the field map for our study area first we're going to add a few points of interest we're going to create a new layer in our geopackage so I choose new geopackage layer I choose the geopackage where we are storing all our data let's call it POI points of interest it's a point layer and we use in the projection that we use on the gps which is Uptm and you can add any field that you want but I just add an id text field to give a code and I choose add new layer so it will be added to the geopackage and now I can digitize those points of interest now what are points of interest points that you want to visit in the field that you can already see that they're interesting from the map for example where paths cross the river the dashed line comes from EGN so where it crosses I'll add a point of interest other points of interest can be if you find something interesting on the geological map on the aerial photograph that you want to visit outcrops that you can see or where tributaries of a river meet where you can do water quality measurements or you want to measure discharge so all kinds of things that are interesting to capture so here just for example I'm adding a couple of those points also give them a good style you can use also an SVG marker here and in this case I'll use the red symbols need to make them bigger and I use the attribute with the id for the labels we'll also make sure that this is nicely visible because we're going to print this and it needs to be readable in the field let's remove the delineated channels and only use the ones from EGN and I also want those points added to the map theme so I need to replace the land cover map theme so it has these updates otherwise they will not show up if I use those map themes I want to add those points of interest also to the topographical map I need to use that map theme and also replace it after switching on the points so that's important let's switch back to the land cover map and start making our new print layout save the project to be sure choose new print layout and give it a unique name called land cover and there's our sheet of paper in a new window the first thing we do is change the page properties and I'm going to use A3 here and depending on the shape of your catchment you can use portrait or landscape in this case the catchment is almost square so it doesn't matter much I'll zoom to the paper and now I'm going to drag the map frame leave a little bit of space on the sides for the coordinate grid they will be added later and now here in the map frame you can tune the size of the map by clicking that other move button and with control scroll you can take small steps in zooming and when you drag the map it will move and make sure that you maximize the space of your study area in the map frame but not that parts are cut off you can always fine tune by changing the value here for the map scale I choose to follow the map theme of land cover later we'll create the other maps and I want to use a grid which is very important for in the field because we use it in combination with our GPS it will use the projection of your project by default and the intervals are in meters then in this case I use a kilometer grid but you can see that it's too coarse a finer grid is better for in the field for this detailed map so I change it to 500 meters it updates when you click in a field and you can change the the black lines to something more subtle but it still needs to be clear for in the field maybe I choose blue and you can change the blending try different types this one is too subtle and it will be hard to read in the field and maybe this one is nicer play around a bit with it get a nice one should not be too dominant but it should be clear I use exterior ticks and I want to draw the coordinates and by default it looks very ugly going to use suffix so we know when it's easting and northing that helps us and I'm going to use for the left vertical ascending and for the right the text should be vertical descending and I don't want decimals so I put that on zero and now it looks much nicer now the only thing to add is the label with the name of the projection that should not be the eps gcode but really the name of the projection so the people in the field can match it with the projection that is set in the gps the gps only returns coordinates and the map can be used to locate yourself by reading the coordinates from the grid so always make sure that the gps projection matches with the map when you save print layout it's saved in the project so basically you save button saves the whole project and I still want a frame that looks a little bit nicer save it and I can export this map to a PDF for printing you can change some settings here but I keep the defaults and then it creates the PDF and when it's done you get a message if you click on it it opens the location of the file and then you can easily open it in your PDF viewer and here we see the field map and we can send that to the A3 printer