QGIS User Conference 2024
This year's QGIS User Conference was organised 9-10 September in the nice capital of Slovakia, Bratislava. The conference was followed by a Contributor Meeting from 11 - 13 September.
I have been attending QGIS User Conferences and Contributor Meetings (formerly known as hackfests) since the one in Nødebo in 2017. They're always useful and a great opportunity to get in touch with the fantastic community.
The event was organized by the Slovak QGIS User Group with support from the QGIS project.
In this blog post, I'll give you some impressions of the event,
which hosted 240 participants with 50 talks and 15 workshops. All talks were recorded and will become available at the QGIS YouTube channel. Links to the video of the presentations mentioned in this blog post will be added when the recordings are made available.
My travel mates
It's becoming a tradition to travel to FOSS4G and QGIS events by public transport instead of flying. This time I traveled with Razan Elnour and Fabian Fonseca.
Razan recently graduated from IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and applied for the QGISHydro Book Fund to present her work with QGIS at the conference. We were happy to support her!
The QGISHydro Book fund is a fund to support female students from the Global South to attend QGIS and FOSS4G events. The funds come from the sales of the book QGIS for Hydrological Applications by Kurt Menke and me, published by Locate Press.
The title of her presentation was QGIS-Enhanced Validation of Remote Sensing Crop Maps: Improving Agricultural Management in the Gezira Scheme, Sudan.
Fabian is a developer of the WaPLUGIN, a plugin that brings data from FAO WaPOR to QGIS. Later more about that.
Opening Session
The Opening Session had a nice keynote from the QGIS PSC vice-chair Anita Graser about the evolution of QGIS, how it is organised and how you can participate as a community member. This was followed by the QGIS Feature Frenzy presentation by Kurt Menke showing the latest features in QGIS.
Also the sponsors were thanked and I'm happy that this year I was able to sponsor the event through my company!
WaPLUGIN
On the first day of the conference I had to present about the WaPLUGIN on behalf of the WaPLUGIN team. The team consists of Fabian Fonseca, Akshay Dhonti, Zoubida Nemer, Célia Hadj Ali and Yacine Tebbouche. Unfortunately, the Algerian team members didn't get their visa. So although the beauftiful presentation was made by Zoubida, I had to present it.
The WaPLUGIN offers an easy way for QGIS users to download data on water and agriculture from the FAO WaPOR portal. The plugin clips the data to the study area and can calculate irrigation performance and water productivity indicators.
The presentation covered the history of the plugin and the newest features. Most importantly, the support for WaPOR V3.
Besides the presentation, I also gave a workshop on the WaPLUGIN that was prepared by the WaPLUGIN team. Fabian assisted me for more technical questions during the workshop.
The workshop materials are available at GIS OpenCourseWare.
Hydrological analysis with PCRaster Tools
The presentation with the title State of the PCRaster Tools plugin gave an overview of tools for hydrology in QGIS and the latest features for the PCRaster Tools plugin.
During the workshop, that was well attended, participants learned to delineate streams and catchments using the PCRaster Tools plugin.
The workshop materials are also freely available at GIS OpenCourseWare.
Presentations and workshops
During the conference I chaired two sessions. The quality of presentations was very good. Highlights from the sessions I chaired:
- Beyond the NDVI: Hyperspectral remote sensing in QGIS with the EnMAP-Box by Benjamin Jakimov. I was impressed by the features offered by the EnMAP-Box plugin. Very nice to see the Sankey charts for land-cover change!
- Native QGIS geological model setup for Africa addressing groundwater scarcity and resilience against climate change by Jakob Lanstorp. I loved the use of the Geometry Generator in combination with the Profile Tool to plot borehole information!
- Kart: Practical Data Versioning in QGIS and beyond by Robert Coup. Kart is very useful for managing versions of your data in a GIT manner.
- Mapping emotional arousal in nature by Ondrej Mitas. A very interesting way of using QGIS and R for mapping well being!
There was also an informal launch party for the new book Collecting Field Data with QGIS and Mergin Maps by Kurt Menke and Alexandra Bucha Rášová published by Locate Press.
Closing session
The session ended with a great thanks to the amazing organisers!
Contributor Meeting
Raymond Nijssen prepared new contributors with an on-boarding session.
I have worked on the following:
- Improvements of the QGIS Certification Programme. Together with Kurt Menke and Lova Andriarimalala we went through all open issues related to the platform. Furthermore, we followed up on applications and improved the web page about certification.
- Based on a discussion with Ismail Sunni we've added a new field for model dependencies to the QGIS Model Hub. For users it will be then easier to know which plugins they need for the models they download. Soon I'll upload my PCRaster-based models. With the QGIS Hub Plugin it will be then easy to filter models based on dependencies and quickly download them into QGIS.
- Contribution to images and screenshots for the new QGIS website, coordinated by Ujaval Gandhi.
- Helping others with specific questions.
Social event and networking
The most important part of the event was to meet the community. A good occasion was at the social event at the Sundeck Pub (especially during the pub quiz!) and during the breaks, drinks and dinners. The pictures below give an impression.
Next QGIS User Conference
The next QGIS User Conference and Contributor Meeting will be hosted from 2 - 6 June 2025 in Norrköping, Sweden. Looking forward to see you there!