Tutorial: Collect Open Data from online sources

The final layer for our groundwater project in Malawi is the transboundary aquifers dataset from the SADC-GIP.

1. Browse to https://sadc-gip.org/ and search for aquifers using the Search field.

2. Select the 2020 - Transboundary Aquifers of the World (unpublished) layer.

3. Check the metadata and attributes.

4. Go to back the QGIS project.

We're going to create a new GeoNode connection with SADC-GIP. You can do that in the same way as you've learned before in section 5. Here we'll present another method.

5. Go to the Browser panel.

At the bottom of the Browser panel you can see the GeoNode connections. If you expand the GeoNode group you can already find the MASDAP connection that we made in section 5.

Here you can also add a new connection.

6. Click right on GeoNode and choose New Connection...

7. In the Create a New GeoNode Connection dialogue type SADC-GIP as Name and https://sadc-gip.org as URL.

8. Click Test Connection.

If the test is successful you'll see this popup:

If the connection fails, check your internet connection and the URL.

9. Click OK to close the popup.

10. Click OK in the dialogue to close it and the new connection is added.

11. Expand the SADC-GIP connection and the WFS group:

12. Drag the 2020 - Transboundary Aquifers of the World (unpublished) layer to the map canvas.

Like we did before we need to export the layer to a local GIS file before we can use it further in GIS.

13. Use the same steps as in section 6 and save the layer as a shapefile with the name aquifers.shp and reprojected to the UTM Zone 36S / WGS-84 projection.

14. Remove the 2020 - Transboundary Aquifers of the World (unpublished) layer from the Layers panel.

Now your project should look like the figure below.

Now we have all the data ready it is good practice to save all the layers in a GeoPackag, including the project, styling and the correct projection. We'll do that in the next section.