Spatial Queries#

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Manual selection#

  • In the toolbar, select the Select Features tool.

  • Select features individually by clicking on a feature.

  • To select several features, you can press and hold Ctrl (Cmd on MacOS) and select one feature after the other.

  • Selected features will be highlighted in bright yellow.

  • If you open the attribute table, the selected feature will appear in blue.

Example: Manually select countries

Select by Location#

  • QGIS lets you select features based on their location using the tool Select by Location.

  • The tool uses spatial queries to select features. These look at the spatial relations between a set of features.

  • For example two features can intersect, or another feature is fully contained within another, or two features do not touch each other (disjoint).

  • QGIS uses the following spatial relations: Intersect, Contain, Disjoint, Equal, Touch, Overlap, Are Within, Cross.

  • Check out the QGIS documentation on spatial relations to learn the differences between each spatial relation.

Example: Select all cities in China (intersect)

Example: Select all neighboring countries of China (touch)

Export Selection#

  • Once selected, you can further manipulate the features by, for example, exporting them to a new layer:

    • Right-click on the layer with the selected features -> Export -> Save selected features as..