Tutorial: Burn stream network into DEM

In the previous section we've downloaded all river line vectors in the study area from OpenStreetMap. In this section we're going to select the Rur river and export it to a new layer.

1. Click right on waterway_river and choose Open Attribute Table.

Inspect the data in the attribute table. You'll see that the name of the river is in the name field. We're going to select rivers with the name Rur and Roer. Rur is the German name and Roer is the Dutch name, so we need both to get the whole river.

2. In the attribute table click the Select features using an expression icon .

3. Type the following expression: "name"  = 'Rur' or "name" = 'Roer'

This will select all features with the name Rur or the name Roer.

4. Click Select Features and Close the dialogue.

Now you'll see these rivers selected in the map canvas (yellow) and in the attribute table (blue).

5. Click right on waterway_river in the Layers panel and choose Export | Save Selected Features As...

6. In the Save Vector Layer As... dialogue save the layer as in the ESRI Shapefile Format with Layer name Rur_river.shp. Change the projection to the one of the project (EPSG: 32632) and click OK.

7. Remove waterway_river from the Layers panel.

Now we need to clean up a bit the river layer. Some sections are not part of the main river.

8. Toggle to editing mode by clicking in the editing toolbar.

9. Select the wrong parts using and press the <Delete> button. Make sure you remove all.

10. Toggle off editing by clicking again and click Save.

The river still consists of many segments. The final step to get a correct river layer is to dissolve the features.

11. In the main menu choose Vector | Geoprocessing Tools | Dissolve...

12. In the Dissolve dialogue choose Rur_river as Input layer, keep the defaults and save the output to the Rur_river_dissolved.shp.

13. Click Run. Close the dialogue after processing.

14. Remove the data_longitudinal_profile Rur_river layer from the Layers panel.

15. Style the Rur_river_dissolved layer. Make it dark blue.

Now we have the complete Rur river, we can burn it into the DEM in the next section.