 Hello, welcome back on my YouTube channel. Last weekend I made a very nice hike with the Erasmus Mundo's flood risk management students in the Saxises-Schweiz in Germany. In this video I'm going to explain how to export a route from Strava and import it into QGIS and then make a nice outdoor map using the map-tile plugin. In Strava, click on your map and choose save route. There you can change the name of the route and you can control the privacy controls. Click save and then the route is saved. In the web browser, go to the Strava website and there you find the dashboard of your account and in the dashboard you can find your routes and they are categorized and here I find the route under hike. I have it two times because I already saved it before in this tutorial. Click on the route and then click export GPX to save the coordinates into a GPX file. Now start QGIS. In QGIS browse to the GPX file and expand the section. Then drag the tracks layer to the map canvas. This is your route. Now we're going to create a very nice map using the map-tile plugin. With map-tiler, you can add vector tiles to QGIS in a very easy way. After installation, you can find map-tiler in the browser panel. Before we can use these layers, we need to configure map-tiler. Click write and choose account. It needs a token from your account. You can click the link to create an account. It's free. I already have an account so I sign in and there you find your credentials, you can give that a name and you can copy the token and paste it here in the map-tiler plugin dialog and now you have authenticated and you're able to use the layers. Now we can add any of these vector and roster tiles to the map canvas and I'm going to add the outdoor layer to the map canvas. The advantage of vector tiles is that you can customize the styles in the labels, exactly in the same way as you're used to in your QGIS project. You saw that it gave an error that not all conversions to the styles went correctly, but that doesn't affect this result and it's depending on the settings in your QGIS version. I'm going to change the project to a UTM projection instead of lat-long, it gives a better view. And now I expand the outdoor group and there we see outdoor as a vector tile and by switching on and off I can see what it is and it gives outdoor features that are nice for an outdoor map and there's a vector tile called contours which has contour lines, very subtle styles here and there's a roster tile terrain RGB which gives the shades and there's map tile planet which gives land cover and there's a general background layer. Let's go to the layer styling panel and here you see the styles that are applied to this outdoor map and you can see the symbology and the rules that are given minimum zoom levels for example and by just double clicking you can change it or if you check or check a box you can make an invisible or hide these styles and in the labels tab you can find the labels. So I'm going to simplify the map a bit by switching off some of the styles that we are not using in this map, so it's a hike, so I hide the bicycle via ferrata trails. Our hiking route is still in the GPX format so let's export this and I'll export it to a geopackage, let's call it schmilka, the name of the place where the route starts. I'm going to re-project it to UTM and I give the layer name hike with the date. Let's remove the original file and let's choose a nice style. I'll choose the wavy line here which is a geometry generator based style and I'm going to change the color of the line to orange and also increase the thickness, so now we have a clear route here on the map. Now I'm going to add raster tile, the terrain RGB which is a DEM which we can also style using any normal raster layer in the layer styling panel. We can change the minimum maximum value, normally you would stretch the values to the current map canvas but in this case that does not work so you have to manually edit the values and I'm going to add another color ramp, I choose create color ramp and then catalog CPT city and there from topography I choose NRWC. That already looks nice but it would also be nice to have a color hill shade so I'm going to create a duplicate of this layer, as with any raster layer you can also export this layer to a DEM, a dupe tiff for example, here I create the duplicate and I'm going to rename this to hill shade and I choose the hill shade vendor from the layer styling panel. I'll switch on early re-sampling because that smooths the blocky effect that we can have, so let's switch on the terrain RGB layer and switch to blending mode to multiply. Now we get the nice color hill shade effect, let's switch on again outdoor but I remove the background and the map tile and planet layer so we can see the color hill shade in the background and the contours and outdoor features on top. Now let's make the contours a bit clearer because the original style doesn't really fit well with our relief colors, so I'm going to make them a little bit darker and that looks great and then from outdoor I'm going to play a bit with the labels because these buffers don't look very nice with this background. Now let's also change the labels of the contours, I remove the buffer but also the color of the label is not very readable, so change it to black. So in this video I've been playing around with vector tiles from MapTiler and it was a bit quick and dirty but I hope you've seen that it's a very powerful and easy way to create beautiful backdrop maps using the available layers from MapTiler and in future videos I will use this more for other demonstrations. So try it yourself, it's free and it's really cool.