Section outline

    • One of the most important uses of GIS in hydrology is the delineation of catchments and streams. This lesson presents a generic workflow for stream and catchment delineation for areas where only open data is available. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 1 Arc Second DEM will be used. The workflow will be applied to the Rur catchment in Germany.

      After this lesson you will be able to:

      • find and download SRTM DEM tiles from the EarthExplorer website
      • mosaic raster layers into a virtual raster
      • reproject rasters
      • create subsets of rasters
      • fill sinks in a DEM
      • calculate and style flow direction raster layers
      • calculate Strahler orders
      • delineate streams
      • delineate catchments
      • style layers for visualising catchments
      You will use the PCRaster Tools plugin in QGIS.

    • Additional resources

      YouTube Playlist QGIS PCRaster Tools Plugin: