Covered Topics:
- 2020 Census Uses QGIS
- Teaching Crop Monitoring with QGIS and Landsat 8
- QGIS Print Composer
The August meeting was held at Interim CDA. Thanks again for their generous use of their conference room.
2020 US Census Uses QGIS
- Paul shared his recent experience using the US Census Bureau’s customized QGIS based GUPS software to participate in the Local Update of Census Addresses in preparation for the 2020 US Census. Along with other tales of King County GIS and open source GIS software.
- GUPS
- The interface was stripped down.
- It had difficulty with the large data sets need for King County (close to one million address records).
- Included data validation which was very valuable to King County.
- One particular hardcore Esri user turned to QGIS to convert CSV data to shape file, when he didn’t have access to his Esri license.
- King County Blog: GIS & You has been publishing some Open Source GIS articles.
- GUPS
Teaching Crop Monitoring with QGIS and Landsat 8
- Robert shared a case study he is using in a QGIS curriculum he’s developing for use at Hue University of Sciences in Vietnam. The case study is using QGIS and Landsat 8 images to monitor
development of a corn crop in a field near Monroe, WA. Monitoring started in April before it was planted and now the corn is 7 feet tall. Monitoring will continue with images every 8 days until after the corn is harvested. The goal is to teach students how to monitor any crop of interest in their country (Vietnam), but Robert is trying to write the course general enough that it well help people no matter where they are in the world. This is the third volume of four total that Robert has planned.
- Robert used a drone for some contextual images to “understand” the landscape and to ground-truth the Landsat 8 imagery.
- Robert has defined his own color ramp for NDVI results.
- There is an associated Go Fund Me Campaign to buy two laptops for low income students. Currently there are 7 computes for approximately 23 students in the classroom that will be used.
QGIS Print Composer
- Peter brought a question about using print composer for QGIS 3.2 for very large format (34” x 70” map) and trying to print using WMTS from Mapbox style. We explored Peter’s problem as a group. The secret is you get the context menu on the map layout view in order to change the page size.