Generating district familiarity maps with QGIS

, 2 min, 236 words

Tags: gis

As discussed previously, I've benefitted a lot from studying my district very explicitly. Generating maps automatically played a huge role in that process, and I wanted to share a high-level overview of how to do this yourself in case any other GIS nerds are also fire nerds, or vice versa.

Sorry, this is a work in progress and I do intend to come back later and expand on some of these steps. Pardon my dust!

Big picture steps:

  1. Find data for your area, including the boundaries of your district and neighboring ones, coastline (if relevant), and roadways.
  2. Find a roadway dataset that includes roadway names, and select only roads that exist at least partially in your district.
  3. Set up a print layout that is the size + shape you want to cover your whole district.
  4. Use the QGIS Atlas feature (I found this documentation helfpul, and this how-to as well) to create an atlas with roads as your feature. To do this you'll have to set up the atlas and then set styling on your roads layer (probably duplicated from your base map, so that you can still see the road layout in the background) to be different between atlas and non-atlas features.
  5. Verify the atlas looks as you expect
  6. Generate your images!