Development of Web Maps with Open Source Software and Free Repositories – Case Study: Geological Risks of Peru

The problems and challenges in water resources management, the environment protection, risk prevention and many subjects related to the human activity require transmitting data in a practical and updated way. The web maps are a good solution since many of these data are associated to a location and the Internet is a great tool available for many. The development of web maps is relatively new but necessary to implement for many uses like data diffusion, the understanding of problematic and decision making.

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Tutorial to Generate Orthophotos from Drone Images with WebODM

Drone imagery is a powerful for geospatial analysis on small scales and high resolutions. The availability to take drone images and the open source tools available allow the user to generate orthophotos with resolutions of less than 1 meter and fully compatible with SIG softwares as QGIS.

This tutorial show the procedure to make an orthophoto with WebODM based on drone images from a pinneapple field.

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How to install Web OpenDroneMap (WebODM) in Windows with Docker

WebOpenDroneMap is a friendly Graphical User Interfase (GUI) of OpenDroneMap. It enhances the capabilities of OpenDroneMap by providing a easy tool for processing drone imagery with bottoms, process status bars, and a new way to store images. WebODM allows to work by projects, so the user can create different projects and process the related images.

As a whole, WebODM in Windows is a implementation of PostgresSQL, Node, Django and OpenDroneMap and Docker. The software instalation requires 6gb of disk space plus Docker. It seem huge but it is the only way to process drone imagery in Windows using just open source software. We definitely see a huge potential of WebODM for the image processing, therefore we have done this tutorial for the installation and we will post more tutorial for the application of WebODM with drone images.

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Working with Sentinel 2 Imagery on QGIS

Sentinel-2 carries an innovative wide swath high-resolution multispectral imager with 13 spectral bands for a new perspective of our land and vegetation. The mission is based on a constellation of two identical satellites in the same orbit, 180° apart for optimal coverage and data delivery. Together they cover all Earth’s land surfaces, large islands, inland and coastal waters every five days at the equator (source ESA).

This is a group of videos called "Working with Sentinel 2 Imagery on QGIS" that shows the complete procedure to download, represent and process Sentinel 2 images in QGIS.

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How to make an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) using only Open Source software?

The study of the environment, the understanding of the water cycle / atmospheric processes and the interaction with the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems need advanced analysis tools. It is important to understand how the environment works and the potential impacts of our actions in the future. This goes further than a regulatory approach, we need a constant search and evolution of codes and models and this is where open source software has important advantages.

This article shows the most important open source software that can be used to make the different sections of an EIA.

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5 QGIS plugins you should know about

5 QGIS plugins you should know about

QGIS development in the past years has been impressive for an open source software. The current version is 2.18 Las Palmas. Each version is better than the previous one when it comes to functionalities, amount of tools, and bug fixing. In my opinion, for an intermediate QGIS user, the amount of new tools are bigger than the ability to learn them. Being up to date with the latest QGIS characteristics requires quite some time.

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10 reasons to stop using ArcGIS (and start using QGIS)

The spatial analysis world is dominated by two software: ArcGIS and QGIS. Both have been available for years and have a strong fanbase. The use of each one of these software generates a duality or polarization of the preferences and opinions about Geographic Information Systems tools (GIS). This article is not about showing the advantages of deficiencies of any of them, but to show the reasons why QGIS is a good option.

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