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QGIS Planet

Organising Charitable Collection Routes with Offline Mobile Maps

Significant time saved when route maps distributed with Input and Mergin.

This case study was originally written in Czech. The Czech version can be found here.

Every year, teams of volunteers walk door-to-door through the Czech town of Litomyšl collecting charitable donations. Event organisers define routes for the various volunteer teams by marking-up paper maps with pens. The process has a number of issues both in the making and usage of the maps which organisers worked to overcome by making the maps digital using open source GIS software.

Maps were developed using QGIS and made available on volunteers’ phones using the Input app. Volunteers are now able to easily orientate themselves on maps which clearly show their routes. Organisers have reduced the time it takes to update routes and distribute these to volunteers.

Veronika Peterková works for the Litomyšl Parish Charity, a non-profit organisation providing health and social services to people in need since 1993.

Veronika describes the charity’s activities: “We provide home medical services and nursing care to the residents of Litomyšl and its surrounding villages. This includes helping families where the healthy development of a child is at risk and providing respite stays for clients who are otherwise cared for by their families at home. We provide care for about 1000 clients a year.”

She added: “We also coordinate the activities of volunteers who visit the elderly, help with tutoring children and with various leisure and cultural activities.”

One of the parish charity’s biggest fundraising events is the “Tříkrálová sbírka” (Three Kings Collection), a door-to-door carol-singing collection taking part around the 6th of January each year.

Tříkrálová sbírka Litomyšl

Volunteers participating in the Three Kings Collection.

“The Three Kings Collection is the largest national volunteer event in the Czech Republic. In the Litomyšl region alone, nearly 300 volunteers are involved each year with the carol-singers collecting over 500,000 Czech crowns (~20,000 EUR) in sealed boxes. The proceeds are intended to help the sick, the disabled, the elderly, mothers with children in need and other in-need groups in the local area.” Veronika explains.

The Three Kings Collection is organised by Caritas Czech Republic and at least 10% of its proceeds are allocated for humanitarian aid abroad.

charita logo

The Challenge

Veronika is responsible for planning routes for the carol-singers so they efficiently visit households in the Litomyšl area. Singers are split into groups and paper maps are provided which show groups which households to visit.

Old map © mapy.cz

An example of previous paper maps, image courtesy of Farní charita Litomyšl.

The above maps were produced by printing screenshots from a national web mapping provider and marking-up printouts for each of the 50 teams using marker pens.

This method proved to have a number of issues as Veronika describes: “On maps of larger areas, house numbers were not always visible due to the scale. This made it even harder for coordinators not familiar with the area to orient themselves, leading to confusion. Coordinators also found it hard to keep the maps dry and undamaged during unfavourable weather. If new groups signed-up afterwards or others opted-out, we’d have to redo/redivide the areas which would be very time-consuming as the maps would need to be marked-up manually once again.”

The Solution and Implementation

Veronika wanted to try a new solution for organising the 2021 Three Kings Collection with the goal of making volunteer tasks clearer and less reliant on paper maps. She wanted the new solution to allow her to:

  • reduce work through the reuse of maps in future Three Kings Collection events
  • easily update maps if new groups sign in/out and areas need editing
  • allow carol singers to see exactly where they are on the map
  • gradually replace paper maps while still allowing the use of paper maps where preferred
  • group and colour buildings to be visited on the computer
  • record a building’s use (e.g. commercial) to direct volunteers more effectively
  • clearly show how areas are assigned so anyone can see who is responsible for a given area

In addition, Veronika wanted the solution to be affordable and work offline without volunteers needing internet connectivity in the field.

Peter Petrík, a regular participant of the Litomyšl Three Kings Collection suggested Veronika try using the Input app for coordinating the collection in 2021. Peter works for Lutra Consulting, the company behind Input and Mergin.

He showed Veronika how to create the maps in QGIS, a free and open source mapping software. Using map data from OpenStreetMap, they created a project showing the buildings to be visited, coloured by their associated volunteer group number.

qgis map © OpenStreetMap contributors

Houses grouped by team in QGIS, image courtesy of Farní charita Litomyšl.

The styled map was uploaded to Mergin, a collaborative mapping platform, making it readily available for viewing interactively on volunteer’s phones using the Input mobile app. Both QGIS and Input integrate closely with Mergin which meant that maps could be adjusted in QGIS with the resulting changes being visible to volunteers shortly thereafter.

Outcomes

Veronika reflects on the solution: “The solution met all our requirements and the maps we’ve prepared can easily be reused in upcoming events, saving us time. The fact that the new maps were made publicly accessible means volunteers can just download them using Input which makes distributing and updating them very easy.”

qgis map © OpenStreetMap contributors

Volunteer routes and position information shown in Input, screenshot courtesy of Farní charita Litomyšl.

She adds: “All the districts we wanted to visit were distinguished from each other by colour and we were also pleased to be able to clearly mark the areas not to be visited like industrial areas by colouring them in grey.”

Unfortunately COVID meant that Veronika’s plans changed as she explains: “Using these new methods we were able to prepare for the 2021 Three Kings Collection in a short time. Unfortunately however, the COVID situation meant we could not go out on the streets to use the new maps as intended. We hope that in 2022 we’ll be able to more closely evaluate the positives and negatives of the field aspect of the project.”

She adds: “We already see it’s now much easier to allocate areas of the town to our volunteers in a clear and fair manner using QGIS. Producing printed maps for those who prefer them is also now easy and the maps look much more professional. Those who only wanted to use the Input app could see the same information as on the paper maps, but had the advantage of being able to pinpoint their exact location and clearly see the house numbers of each building.”

new map © OpenStreetMap contributors

Example printed map created for volunteers wanting also paper maps, image courtesy of Farní charita Litomyšl.

She concludes: “Overall we found the solution user-friendly, and appreciated being able to discuss the process with Lutra Consulting who helped us solve issues as required. About a third of our volunteers are interested in using Input, which I consider positive.”

The Litomyšl Parish Charity are on Facebook and Instagram.

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Screenshots of the Input App for Field Data Collection

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QGIS Cloud: Starting a new feature series for QGIS Cloud Pro customers

We are pleased to announce that today we have published a new release of QGIS Cloud. Besides a whole bunch of bug fixes, we have also introduced new features for QGIS Cloud Pro customers. Starting with this release, we will be releasing more features for our QGIS Cloud Pro customers in the coming weeks. The following new features are available for QGIS Cloud Pro users starting today. Import Layer: In the Layers & Legend tool you will now find the possibility to import layers.
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Case Study: QGIS Core Development for TUFLOW

The case study presents the C++ development of QGIS Desktop to support rendering of 3D results produced by TUFLOW’s 3D capable solver: TUFLOW FV (10 minute read)

Introduction

TUFLOW is a suite of advanced 1D/2D/3D computer simulation software for flooding, urban drainage, coastal hydraulics, sediment transport, particle tracking and water quality. With over 30 years of continuous development, TUFLOW is internationally recognised as one of the industry leaders for hydraulic modelling accuracy, speed and workflow efficiency.

Lutra Consulting Ltd is a leader in software development for pre- and post-processing of hydraulic and meteorological results in open-source QGIS. We also work on mobile data collection Input App and GIS data synchronization service Mergin

TUFLOW

In 2019 the TUFLOW team commissioned us to develop post-processing support for their TUFLOW Flexible Mesh format for QGIS 3.12. The format is 3D stacked mesh, which consists of multiple stacked 2D unstructured meshes each extruded in the vertical direction (levels) by means of a vertical coordinate.

TUFLOW

At that time QGIS only supported 2D meshes that defined results on vertices and faces. We had been keen to extend the capabilities of the software stack to support 3D mesh data for a long time so this was an exciting opportunity. Part of the task was also to include rendering support for TUFLOW model results on the QGIS 3D view. The delivery of the project was within one QGIS release cycle (less than 6 months time for users to use it on their projects!)

Flooding simulation simulated as a mesh layer in QGIS 3D

Contact us at info@lutraconsulting.co.uk if you’d like to discuss the benefits of integrating your flood modelling software more tightly with QGIS or you have some custom QGIS development in mind.

C++ Development Process: From requirement to delivery

Communicate project with the community first

When doing a substantial change in the QGIS codebase, the developer needs to write a technical specification of the QGIS changes for community discussion. QGIS Core Developers (which Lutra is a part of) can give valuable feedback to the overall technical approach and the wider community can raise some usability issues or enhancement proposals. Most importantly, each part of the QGIS code has its lead maintainers, for example Martin Dobias, our CTO, is the maintainer of QGIS 3D code and Peter Petrik is the maintainer of the Mesh layer code. It is a good practice to address the maintainers’, users’ and other developers’ concerns and feedback to ensure the feature can be implemented in QGIS.

So after a thorough discussion about the requirements with the TUFLOW team and analysis of the existing tools for post-processing and display of the TUFLOW FV format we came up with the QGIS Enhancement: Support of 3D layered meshes

The community reaction was very positive and supportive. Time to start coding!

MDAL to support TUFLOW FV NetCDF format

Mesh Data Abstraction Library MDAL is a C++ library for handling unstructured mesh data. It provides a single data model for multiple supported data formats. MDAL is used by QGIS for data access for mesh layers. If you want QGIS to support your data format, you need to have a driver in MDAL that implements it.

MDAL

We added support for 3D stacked meshes and the TUFLOW FV format in MDAL. When we develop features in MDAL, we focus on quality code, so

  • all changes have a proper code review,
  • all code has fully automated tests with more than 90% coverage target
  • the documentation and manual testing is done after coding

To implement the TUFLOW FV driver for 3D stacked meshes, we added a new API/interface in MDAL, so we needed to follow up with the QGIS changes in QgsMeshLayer and MDAL data-provider.

QGIS C++ Development to support stacked meshes and visualization in 3D

The implementation of large feature changes is best to split into smaller but self-consistent parts. For example the first pull request added the basic support for the new 3D stacked meshes. Each pull request we do has a screenshot or gif/video with the new functionality preview, follows QGIS Coding Standards, has unit tests where necessary and includes the documentation for the functions/classes added in the public interface. Once the request is merged, the features are next day available in nightly builds on all platforms for testing!

3D Terrain in QGIS3

Final Steps: feedback, testing, documentation and presentation

When all the features were in QGIS master, the TUFLOW team used windows nightly builds to test the new features and provide feedback. After a small number of iterations, all issues were resolved and implementation signed.

Shortly the new official QGIS release was published and we started promotion of the new features on our social media channels. Also, the features developed under this contract were promoted in the visual QGIS changelog.

Streamlines in QGIS3

Benefits for TUFLOW to support QGIS Core C++ Development:

  • Reduced development and maintenance costs for tools such as the TUFLOW Viewer QGIS Plugin since the new features are part of the QGIS core
  • By being part of the QGIS ecosystem it provides opportunities to approach QGIS users in the flooding and coastal modeling industry to use TUFLOW software
  • As a project sponsor, the requirements of the new features meet the present and future needs of the TUFLOW user base.
  • At the beginning of the project Lutra showed all the current relevant capabilities of QGIS ecosystem, allowing TUFLOW to be aware of the latest and greatest features
  • Allowed TUFLOW to solve upstream bugs in QGIS or MDAL due to the open-source nature of the projects
QGIS3

Benefits for TUFLOW users:

Key benefits made available to TUFLOW users include:

  • Being able to work with TUFLOW models using open source GIS on all major operating systems
  • A full GIS application to support their data pre-processing
  • Logical and intuitive workflows
  • Visualisation and post-processing of TUFLOW results natively in QGIS via mesh layer
  • The development allows interactive plotting features for 3D results, such as 3D profiles and curtains that can be easily extracted, providing an improved user experience
  • Ability to use all native QGIS support and development channels in addition to TUFLOW support
  • Integration of internal workflows with powerful native QGIS features including projection support, GDAL/OGR integrations, background maps support (e.g. vector tiles) and printed flood maps.

Further Reading

Do you have any questions or would like to see a demo of the QGIS Mesh Layer? Contact us at info@lutraconsulting.co.uk or schedule a demo call calendly.com/saber-razmjooei/15min

Key words

QGIS, migration, optimised, speed up, fast, hydraulic modelling, water, 2D, 3D, open-source, cost reduction, software development, TUFLOW, TUFLOW FV

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Mergin Maps, a field data collection app based on QGIS. Mergin Maps makes field work easy with its simple interface and cloud-based sync. Available on Android, iOS and Windows. Screenshots of the Mergin Maps mobile app for Field Data Collection
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MDAL gets adopted as an OSGeo Community Project

Mesh Data Abstraction Library MDAL proudly joins the OSGeo Community program

We would like to share the excellent news that the OSGeo incubation committee kindly accepted the MDAL project into its Community Program. MDAL is an MIT Licensed C++ Library which integrates into your QGIS installation and is backed by the Lutra Consulting team and the wider community.

MDAL is a low-level library which allows reading unstructured mesh data from various formats. If you’ve never seen a QGIS Mesh Layer, then check out my presentation at FOSS4G 2019.

We kicked-off the MDAL project at the time we were migrating the Crayfish plugin to QGIS version 3. The Crayfish project started in late 2012, has more than 120,000 downloads and opened the way engineers and data scientists to visualize their hydro and meteo-data in QGIS.

QGIS uses MDAL to visualize, analyze and even modify data on unstructured meshes which are used by many hydraulic / numercial modelling solvers. In addition to providing abstraction for complex mesh data structures, MDAL also allows vectoral (e.g. wind speed) and temporal data to be visualised effectively and easily in QGIS.

The MDAL project (and therefore the wider community) has benefitted from generous sponsors such as TUFLOW, 3Di, Hydrotech, DHI, FLO-2D, Artelia, Federal Ministry of Austria for Agriculture, Regions and Tourism and many others. If you’d like to see your formats or workflows supported by QGIS then please consider becoming a sponsor or contact Peter at peter.petrik@lutraconsulting.co.uk

Right now we’re working on some new mesh frame editing tools for QGIS 3.22 (due for release in autumn 2021) and of course support for additional result file formats.

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(Fr) QSoccer : QGIS, football, what else ?

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

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QGIS Cloud: Permanent displaying the legend in a fixed location in QGIS Cloud QWC2 with CSS

With QGIS Cloud Pro it is possible to change the appearance and behaviour of the QGIS Cloud Web Client via CSS. You can easily manipulate the colour of frames and fonts, etc. An example that is not obvious is displaying the legend in a fixed location on the map. In this way, the legend can be made a fixed part of the map in QGIS Cloud QWC2. In the basic configuration of QGIS Cloud QWC2 the legend of a layer is not permanently displayed.
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Mergin CE (open source) released

We’d like to share some exciting news with you about our cloud-based geo-data synchronisation service, Mergin.

In this post we’ll talk both about Mergin the online managed service (Mergin Cloud) and also about the software stack that powers it (the Mergin Software Stack).

Mergin CE

The Mergin Software Stack has been developed and maintained at Lutra Consulting over the past 3 years to power our Mergin Cloud service and has been maturing nicely in production.

We believe a sync service for supporting field-based GIS activities has been a missing piece of the open geospatial puzzle, and as strong advocates of open source software, we’re now sharing the Mergin Software Stack with the community. Therefore, on the 14th of June we released Mergin CE on GitHub. The CE stands for Community Edition.

The release means a fully open solution for field data collection and synchronisation is now possible using QGIS, Input app and Mergin CE.

Mergin CE is released under the AGPL licence and we are open to contributions from others. Looking forward to seeing what the open source community has to offer!

Mergin CE gives you the freedom to deploy, host and manage your own Mergin server on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over your data. Mergin CE comes without commercial support.

Our main efforts are still very much focussed on the continuous improvement of Mergin Cloud, making it an awesome fully managed service for our customers.

We also now provide Mergin EE (Enterprise Edition) for those who want an on-premises deployment but with extra features like Active Directory integration, commercial support, and/or prefer a licence other than AGPL.

Changes to Mergin Cloud

Releasing Mergin CE got us taking another look at Mergin Cloud’s Community (free of charge) tier. That’s why from today we’re updating Mergin Cloud’s Terms of Service so its free tier can no longer be used to store projects for commercial use. Mergin accounts storing projects for commercial use should now purchase a paid subscription after their initial 14 day evaluation period.

A common surveying setup is a single paid account (providing extra storage for projects) and a handful of free tier accounts used by surveyors for collecting field data. This is still possible because the new Terms only require that the Mergin account hosting/storing/owning the commercial project has a paid subscription.

For example, consider two users: Fred (who uses a free account) and Penny (who uses a paid account). Penny is permitted to use the project Penny/Survey for commercial purposes as it resides on her paid account. Fred (who uses a free account) is permitted to collaborate on the commercial project Penny/Survey as it resides on Penny’s paid account. However, Fred may not use the project Fred/Survey2 for commercial use as it resides on his free account.

In light of the release of Mergin CE, we feel it is fair to encourage those using Mergin Cloud’s free tier for commercial gain to support us with one of our affordable subscriptions. The link also has a number of frequently asked questions relating to this change.

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Geodiff version 1.0

We are excited to announce that the geodiff library has finally reached version 1.0. We have started to develop geodiff back in 2019 as a part of our efforts to allow synchronisation of changes between the Input mobile app and Mergin platform.

geodiff-diff.png

At the core, geodiff library provides functionality to:

  • compare a pair of GeoPackage databases and create “diff” files containing changes between them
  • apply a “diff” file to a GeoPackage database
  • rebase changes in a “diff” file
  • invert, concatenate diffs and other utility functions

Thanks to the above low-level operations, any changes to data stored in spatial/non-spatial tables in GeoPackages can be easily transferred to others and applied. And thanks to the “rebase” functionality - inspired by source code management systems like git - we can automatically merge changes from multiple users capturing data offline in Input/Mergin (see our recent blog post that covers rebasing for more).

The library is written in C++, providing stable C API and offering Python bindings as well (look for pygeodiff package in pip). It also comes with a command line interface tool geodiff covering all major features. The whole package has a very permissive MIT license.

Support for drivers

Initially, geodiff library only worked with SQLite / GeoPackage files. This has changed with the version 1.0 - geodiff supports drivers, allowing use of different database backends to compare and apply diffs. In the 1.0 release we have added PostGIS driver in addition to SQLite/GeoPackage driver.

This means that users can compare tables or apply diffs in PostGIS databases using the same APIs as with GeoPackages. And not only that - diff files are compatible across different drivers. That means it is possible to take a diff file from a GeoPackage and apply it to PostGIS database!

Using the PostGIS driver we were able to create mergin-db-sync tool as a companion to Mergin platform. With DB sync, one can keep a local PostGIS database always in sync with a project in Mergin, supporting automatic transfer of changes from Mergin to PostGIS and the other way round as well - from PostGIS to back Mergin.

Try it

The library is hosted on GitHub in lutraconsulting/geodiff repository. We would love to hear your feedback!

Stay tuned for more!

As announced earlier, next week we will be open sourcing Mergin, our platform for easy sharing of spatial data in teams (whether they are in office or in the field). If you have not heard about Mergin platform yet, please have a look at the Mergin website, try Mergin plugin for QGIS and Input app, a mobile app based on QGIS for iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Since the initial release in early 2019, Mergin and Input have been used by thousands of users around the world.

At Lutra Consulting, we are dedicated to improving free and open source software for geospatial. We will be releasing Mergin as open source to solve another missing piece in the puzzle, providing open source end-to-end solution for mobile data capture for QGIS users. Watch our blog and Twitter for further updates!

Mergin

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How Mergin/Input sync changes in your QGIS projects

People often ask whether the Mergin service and the Input app can deal with multiple team members doing edits at the same time.

They happily find out that the answer is yes - it is one of the core features that greatly simplifies life of our users. In this post we will shed some light on how things work behind the scenes.

Mergin promo

Getting started

Let’s think of a simple project directory that needs to be synchronised between multiple desktop or mobile users, containing just two files:

  • a QGIS project file my-project.qgz that sets up map layers, styling, …
  • a GeoPackage file my-data.gpkg containing all GIS data

Our sample GIS data will contain a tree survey table, containing location, species and age of various trees:

tree survey table

When users edit data in my-data.gpkg, the traditional cloud storage solutions (such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and others) simply copy the modified files there. They do not understand the file content though - so if two people modify the same file, they have no way of knowing how to merge changes together. In the worse case, when two versions of the same file are uploaded, they keep just the version which was synchronised last. Or slightly better, they resort to creation of conflicting copies which need to be manually merged later. As one can imagine, merging and consolidating modifications from multiple GeoPackages back to one copy is a slow, tedious and error-prone job.

the Mergin service has been designed to understand spatial data, especially GeoPackages that are becoming the most popular format to store vector & attribute data. This is thanks to the open source geodiff library that we have developed while working on Mergin.

Synchronising data using “diffs”

The first trick is that synchronisation of GeoPackage files between Mergin server and clients (Input app, QGIS or other apps) only transfers actual changes in tables (“diffs” in technical jargon).

Our Mergin project with the tree survey has been prepared and downloaded by users. Jack did a field survey and he added or updated some rows in the survey table (changes highlighted in yellow and green):

Jack table

After pressing sync button, his changes are detected and uploaded to Mergin, encoded as a list of changes to the survey table:

Jack diff

Another user, Jill, also downloaded the tree survey project to her mobile device prior to Jack’s changes. When Jill synchronises the project to get the latest version, the changes as uploaded by Jack are downloaded and applied to her local copy of the project, getting the same data as seen by Jack.

At this point, the advantage of uploading/download only changes in tables may not seem obvious besides saving some network bandwidth… Read on to learn how this is used to support multi-user editing.

Merging changes from multiple users

So far we have expected that Jill does not have any pending changes to sync, so that was easy. Now let’s assume that Jill has also done some changes on her device:

Jill table

Here comes the more tricky part - how do we merge changes from Jack and Jill back to a single table:

Merging Jack and Jill table

In Mergin, cases that require merging changes from multiple users are handled by the “rebase” operation, a concept we have borrowed from version control systems for source code.

Let’s assume that Jack has synchronised his changes first. Later, when Jill synchronises her changes, a couple of things happen on her device before uploading the changes: Jill’s changes will be temporarily undone, Jack’s changes get applied, and finally Jill’s changes are re-applied after being rebased on top of Jack’s changes.

What does it mean to rebase someone’s changes? There are a couple of possible edit conflicts that could happen between rows of a database table with matching IDs (insert/insert, update/delete, delete/delete, update/update). These edit conflicts need to be resolved in order to be able to merge changes from multiple users.

In our example, both Jack and Jill have added a row with ID = 4. This is not allowed, and therefore Jill’s new row ID will get changed to ID = 5 (any unused ID would do). As a result, here’s how the merged table will look at the end - combining changes of both users:

Final table

If both Jack and Jill modified the same row (the update/update edit conflict), we can only accept one edit automatically. The conflicting edit of the other user is written to a special conflict file and uploaded to Mergin, so no data gets lost, and the conflict can be later inspected by the project admin. Fortunately, this kind of conflict does not happen often if the survey work is well planned to avoid users simultaneously modifying the same features within the GeoPackage data.

What if conflict files appear

There are some cases when automatic merging is not supported. In those cases, Mergin is unable to find out details about changes in the data file(s) and has to resort to creation of a conflicting copy which gets uploaded to Mergin project along the original data file(s). In particular the problems may appear when:

  • Other format than GeoPackage is used for data storage (e.g. shapefiles)
  • Database or table structure is changed (e.g. adding new columns or new tables)

In the future, these limitation may be removed, but at this point it is good to keep them in mind.

If you plan to change structure of the survey tables and the project is already being used on multiple devices, it may be a good idea to create a new Mergin project with the modified database structure and instruct users to switch to the new project. Otherwise conflict files may start popping up as long as some users have older version of the project, adding more manual work to collate data.

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Why are my survey points shifted?

It happens that when you collect data and then checking it in the office on your desktop using QGIS, the points are misplaced and shifted. This blog post explains the possible root cause of this issue? (Read time 5 min)

This article follows the help document about the projections and coordinate reference system handling in QGIS.

The accuracy of the captured points is affected by two main factors

  • GPS receiver and accuracy
  • Selection of coordinate reference systems used in the project

Lets take a closer look at both problems in context of field surveys.

GPS accuracy

GPS accuracy depends on the quality of your GPS receiver and the number of visible GPS satellites your receiver can use at the moment of capturing the point.

When you load the map in Input app, the bottom bar contains the GPS marker with a coloured dot. The dot can have the following three colours:

  • green: The actual accuracy is below the threshold
  • orange: The actual accuracy is above the threshold
  • red: The GPS is unavailable

GPS accuracy low

For different use cases, acceptable accuracy is different. So the threshold for the colour scheme could be adjusted in the Input app settings. Always adjust the settings based on your project needs and check the GPS accuracy when capturing data.

Input app GPS settings

The GPS receiver itself can be either improved by usage of device with a better internal hardware or usage of powerful external GPS receivers If you want to use the external GPS receiver, read the following help article for setup.

Projection problems

First of all, there could be multiple problems with setup of coordinate reference systems and transformations. To solve it, you need to load the project in QGIS, using Mergin Plugin and check for various situations as described in this help article.

Input app checks for missing datum shift files or other transformation problems and notify you once at the project load by following message.

shift of the point

To be able to use the datum grid shift in your mobile app:

  • Copy the proj folder from your QGIS working directory (see help page for different platforms)
  • Paste the folder to your survey project downloaded fromt he Mergin server
  • Sync the changes

For our example with the British national grid on Windows, the grid file is called OSTN15_NTv2_OSGBtoETRS.gsb and if the Mergin project is in C:\users\qgis\myproject then it should be copied to C:\users\qgis\myproject\proj directory and synchronised by the Mergin service to the Input app.

Notes:

  • This is one-off process. Input app will transfer the grid shift datum to its own working directory on your mobile device.
  • There might be more than one datum grid shift in your QGIS working directory. Use the appropriate one for your survey project.

You can find a short summary of this article on the Input app help pages

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