Exercise: The world

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Aim of the exercise

This exercise will help you to get to know the interface of QGIS a bit better. Furthermore, you will load your first data in QGIS and gain some hands-on experience with the layer concept.

Relevant Wiki Articles

• QGIS Interface

• Types of Geodata

• Geodata Import in QGIS

• Layer Concept

Data sources

Download the data folder here and save it on your PC. Unzip the .zip file! The folder is called “Modul_2_Exercise1_The_World” and contains the whole standard folder structure with all data in the input folder and the additional documentation in the documentation folder.

• World Countries (Generalized) (Polygon/Shapefile)

• Significant Earthquake Dataset (CSV)

• Global Power Plant Dataset (Points/GeoPackage)

Task

1. Open QGIS and create a new project by clicking on Project -> New

2. Once the project is created save the project in the “project” folder of the “Ex_The_world”. To do that click on Project -> Save as and navigate to the folder. Name the project “Ex_The_World”.

3. Load the shape file “World_countries__generalized” in your project by drag and drop (Wiki Video]). Or click on Layer-> Add Layer-> Add Vector Layer. Click on the three points and navigate to “World_countries__generalized”. Select the file and click Open. Back in QGIS click Add (Wiki Video).

Attention

With both methods, you need to select the file with the ending .shp !

4. Load the GeoPackage file “global_power_plant_database_nuclear.gpkg” in the QGIS project. You can use one of the methods above. Either drag and drop (Wiki Video]) the file or click on Layer-> Add Layer-> Add Vector Layer. Click on the three points and navigate to “global_power_plant_database_nuclear.gpkg”. Select the file and click Open. Back in QGIS click Add(Wiki Video).

Note

GeoPackage file can contain multiple files and even whole QGIS projects. When you load such a file in QGIS a window will appear in which you have to select the files you want to load in your QGIS project.

5. Now we want to load the file “Significant_earthquake_data.txt” into QGIS. Since this is vector data in text format we need to follow a certain process (Wiki Video).

   • Click on Layer-> Add Layer-> Add Delimited text Layer. Click on the three points and navigate to “Significant_earthquake_data.txt”. Select the file and click Open.

   • In the window “Data Source manager| Delimited Text” in QGIS open the dropdown menu File Format and check Custom delimiter and Tab

   • Open the dropdown menu Geometry definition. Make sure the option Point coordinates is checked. Furthermore, select for X field “LONGITUDE” and for Y field “LATITUDE”.

   • Select the coordinate reference system (CRS) “EPSG:4326-WGS 84”.

   • Click Add

   Note

   When loading vector data in text format like .csv or .txt in QGIS, these data has to have latitude and longitude columns.

   • X field =“LONGITUDE”

   • Y field = “LATITUDE”.

6. Arrange the three layers in a practical order. Remember the Layer Concept.

7. Interact with the map and explore the data sets. Use the zoom tool and move the map.

8. Save your project by clicking on the or use the hotkey combination Ctrl + S

Tip

If you see * before the name of your project on the top left corner of QGIS this means there are unsaved changes in your project. Save your progress!

9. Your results should look something like this: