Hello everybody!
I was wondering what are the possibilities of utilization of QGIS, its toolboxes and plugins to conduct a research on natural disasters and hazards with emphasis on geotechinical variables [e.g. soil, vegetation and hydrology].
Would like to know also if anyone would happen to know where i could access some training datasets, video tutorials (or not) and/or some references.
I've taken a brief look in INSAFE QGIS plugin, but other than this brief look, I have a shallow understing of the actual workflow of this kind of studies.
Thanks!
I think ArcGIS can do this similar work.
If possible, I prefer ArcGIS to QGIS.
Thanks for your reply Afeez!
But what about QGIS: do you have any information respect to its utilization in this kind of research?
Cheers!
Dear Gabriel,
QGIS is just a platform, a software, which can be certainly used for spatial modelling of various environmental processes. But these tools cannot solve general problems. At the very begining you should define the key issue(s), you want to solve. After that you can start to seek for the relevant methods and data, which can assist you in their treatment. I am pretty sure, you can identify the necessary toolsets in any up-to-date GIS environment.
László
Hi Gabriel!
I've been using QGIS for some years to analyse disaster factors and impacts, considering precisely the items you mentioned. QGIS (or any other GIS software - I prefer those that are free) is useful to deal with spatial information, most of all because it allows you to overlay layers that represents some of the factors with cartographic strictness. This makes it possible for you to consider at least some of the complexity involved in disasters and related phenomena, using models.
There are many preexisting tools to analyse data related to water, relief and vegetation; they consist of algorithms that represent several kinds of models based in physical or statistical assumptions. Both SAGA and GRASS tools - easily accesible through a dropdown menu in QGIS Processing Toolbox - have lots of alternatives to analyse and manipulate terrain and hydrological data, for exemple. Some native QGIS tools also have this power. With this, and a Digital Elevation Model you can analyse slopes, profiles, aspects, flow direction, and so on...
In what comes to soil, through GIS you are able to interpolate point data obtained with field work/soil samples using geostatiscal techniques, also available in the menu I mentioned. Also, you can relate this or any other sample to other data layers and search for coincidences/correlations, only by seeing it briefly, or by testing them statistically.
About vegetation, the same is valid, but there's also the possibility to analyse vegetatation cover through satellite images, and for this you have some image classification plugins you can install, such as the Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin and also the MapBiomas collection plugin (if your study area is in Brazil). Vegetation is the hardest data to be obtained and used as direct input in a disaster model, I believe, and only the cover does not inform you much about what truly matters for the models, but it can be useful to analyse landcover evolution associated with disaster risk and some other processes related to water balance.
Generally, models that "simulate" the processes you might be interested in, are more specific - i.e. some landslide model or some susceptibility map method described in the literature - and are eventually external to QGIS. You have to know precisely what kind of disaster you want to analyse, and then chose a model. If there's no implementation/tool for the model you chose, you can represent the mathematical aspects of it in QGIS Models Tool. It is very frequent to implement the equations using this or the QGIS Raster Calculator, and conecting results and other inputs through the Models Tool. In this case, it is convenient to find a way of converting all your data to raster formats so the equations can perform well with all the parameters. All of the raster and vector processing needed to prepare your data can also be done with QGIS - this is the first step.
It is important to state that all of this depends on the quality of your data, and that models are inexact representations, even though some are useful, as George Box said. With this enourmous text I tried to ilustrate generally what I see as a possible workflow in QGIS, I hope it helps you somehow!
Dear Gabriel,
I think those links might be useful for you:
https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/
https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/trainingmaterial/index.html
Greetings.
Dear Gabriel ,
I recommend a book and an online course for hydrology applications. Maybe you want look at them and they are useful for you.
https://locatepress.com/hyd
https://www.un-ihe.org/qgis-hydrological-applications
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