← Methods 3

In-class Exercises

Part 1: Time Manager

  1. Download this data.
  2. Open the earthquakes shapefile in QGIS.
  3. Install the TimeManager QGIS plugin.
  4. Use TimeManager to animate the earthquakes using the time column with a time frame of one day.

Part 2: 3D maps

  1. Open the buildings-lower-manhattan shapefile in QGIS.
  2. Add a 3d view: View > New 3D Map View.
  3. Enable 3D rendering on the buildings layer and set the extrusion. Hold shift and drag the mouse cursor to change the perspective on the 3d view.

Part 3: Data Plotly

  1. Open the queens-tenancy-income shapefile in QGIS.
  2. Install the Data Plotly plugin.
  3. Open Data Plotly: Plugins > Data Plotly > Data Plotly plugin.
  4. Make a scatterplot of income versus owners.
  5. Try the box select tool on the plot.
  6. Experiment with some other plots, such as histograms.

Part 4: LiDAR imagery

  1. Open landcover.tif in QGIS. This is an extract of the city-wide landcover data available on the open data portal.
  2. Experiment with using the Sieve function: Raster > Analysis > Sieve, select a place to save and a threshold (say 100). This will make smaller clumps of pixels become part of their neighboring clumps of pixels.
  3. Right click on the original image, select Styles > Copy Styles, then paste them into the sieved layer (right click, Styles > Paste Styles).
  4. Build vectors out of the resulting raster. Go to Raster > Conversion > Polygonize and select a location to save to.
  5. In the vector layer use an expression to select only the paved areas (gray in the raster).