The vegetation indices are obtained from area and satellite images and can be used to estimate changes in the state of vegetation, biomass, leaf area index and chlorophyll concentration. The determination of vegetation indices is calculated from the relationship between the reflectance of the electromagnetic spectrum. While biomass presents various methodologies to be able to estimate that they are based on field measurements that despite being a direct method are still very limited. Currently, the use of remote sensors provides a method to generate information on biomass.

In this tutorial the estimation and relationship of the biomass of a study area with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Normalized Red-Green Difference Index (NGRDI) will be carried out.

Mining and the treatment of metals are a significant source for the contribution of pollutants in various natural resources such as lakes. The impact of a pollutant on the lakes depends on the physical and chemical conditions that affect its toxicity and the degree of exposure related to concentration and time. The contribution of metals can be incorporated by precipitation, mine filtration, soil washing, leaching and percolation.

Remote sensing allows the interpretation of dynamic processes in a study area at a spatial and temporal level. This information is collected from the surface that is captured by a sensor located on board a satellite in orbit around the earth. In this way, you can compare images and analyze the changes of a study area.

Different space agencies have facilitated access to information provided by satellites through servers and web portals, where satellite images can be downloaded for the analysis and interpretation of resources, for this instance, the quality of seawater can be analyzed through the classification of specific footprints using geographic information systems tools such as QGIS 3 and the Semi-Automatic Classification plugin.

Image from earth surface are available from satellite images and unmanned aerial vehicules (UAV). Image resolution ranges from 10 meters on free available datasets as Sentinel2, less than 1 meter on commercial satellite imagery to 0.05m (or even less) from UAVs.

Scikit-image is a library for image processing in Python. Currently there are few QGIS plugins that run Scikit-image, we found one that extracts geological features as fractures and represent fault dip, dip direction, and strike in stereonets and rose diagrams. This tutorial show the procedure to install GeoTrace on QGIS 3 with its dependencies, runs a geological fault trace on a modified raster, calculate fault strike azimuths as a separate attribute field represent them as a strike rose.

For a normal GIS user, QGIS 3 brings a lot of new tools, new forms to perform spatial analysis but also it doesn´t bring (yet) some options available in QGIS 2. This is the case for the representation of HDF raster files that is not available in QGIS 3 but it is available in QGIS 2. Research have been performed to address this issue and many options were evaluated to open the HDF files and perform a geotransformation from Sinusoidal Coordinate System to Geographical Coordinate System.

The solution came from the powerful gdal library and some core Python functions. This tutorial show the procedure to open a layer of a MOD13A2, a MODIS data product for vegetation evaluation and reproject it to geographical coordinate system (lat/lon).

There are several satellites with different characteristics that acquire multispectral images of the surface of the earth. In this case, the Sentinel 2 images are particularly useful for the monitoring of land cover and can be provided free of charge from SCP.

In this tutorial we will perform the evaluation of spectral signatures using the Semi-automatic Classification complement in version 6, which is a free open source plugin for QGIS 3 that allows the supervised and unsupervised classification of remote sensing images.

Spatial interpolation techniques used to evaluate estimations of physical and chemical constituents in areas where they are not estimated (Murphy et al., 2009). This tutorial will show how to interpolate data from point data to obtain a raster that covers the study area and, then, to obtain contour lines from the raster.

The Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) method is one of the most used due to its simplicity. IDW expect that each point has a nearby impact that reduces with distance. It gives more weight to the points nearest to the forecast area. QGIS has the ability to perform this interpolation method by using data points and the result is displayed as a raster file.

The root mean square error (RMSE) has been used as a standard statistical parameter to measure model performance in several natural sciences. The parameter indicates the standard deviation of the residuals or how far the points are from the regression or modelled line. The following figure shows the residuals as green arrows and its location between the point data and the regression line. 

Electrical Conductivity (EC) has been used to analyze the content of dissolved salts in water. EC refers to the ability to transmit electricity (Ikeda et al. 1991). Pure water has low values of EC because the electricity is conducted by the ions in solution; therefore, the greater the concentration of ions in water, the greater the value of EC. This tutorial explains how to analyze the EC of a river using the Profile Tool plugin in QGIS 3.0.

Time series in hydrology can be analyzed to a) detect a trend due to another random hydrologic variable, b) develop and calibrate a model, c) predict future characteristics of a variable (Machiwal & Jha 2012). The application of time series analysis is diverse; for instance, it can be used to evaluate global trends of soil moisture (Dorigo et al. 2012), to analyze river discharges (Papa et al. 2012), to detect glacial lake outburst floods (Veh et al. 2018) or to detect rainfall patterns (Wang et al. 2016).

The visualization of the data variability over the time can be a useful tool to identify patterns or to compare the behavior of different samples. The use of software for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allows to identify the location of the samples and to compile the information that the samples have. Open-source software like QGIS offers excellent tools to achieve this objective. This tutorial will explain how to use the Time Manager Plugin.

There are tools for temporal data analysis like Python, IPython and Jupyter; there are tools for spatial data analysis like QGIS. But, are there tools for spatio-temporal analysis? Unfortunately no, but there are good approaches to manage spatial data in Jupyter or to run IPython in QGIS3. These approaches aren't a complete ansqwe to the current demands of big data processing in few computational time with simple scripts, but by sure it will help to shape better solutions.

The new version of QGIS is QGIS3 and it runs with Python 3 which introduces some change on the interaction with webservers with package “requests”. For those that are new to the IMERG images, those are some kind of the new TRMM images with precipitation estimation from multiple passive microwave (PMW) sensors on various precipitation-relevant satellites starting in March 2014. The IMERG images have a pixel resolution of 0.1 degrees and a temporal scale of 30 minutes; on the current panorama of precipitation estimates based on satellite-gauge, the IMERG data product with the highest spatial and temporal resolution available over the last 4 years.