High-resolution Imagery – Checking Your Burns

Using high-resolution mapping through the fire season can be helpful for assessing how your prescribed burning is going.

This mapping is some times provided through an exteral contractor conducting mapping using Sentinel-2 or Landsat imagery. However this mapping can take a while to come through and is not always available.

An easy way to visualize the results of recent burning is by using NAFIs automated WMS (web mapping service) to visualise recent imagery of your area within QGIS.

Once signed up for this service you will receive an email that contains the following important URLs (web addresses):

  1. URL to the WMS/WMTS map server for your property (see example below)
  2. A URL to the Google drive share where you will be able to download the imagery as GeoTIFF (Geo PDFs are coming)

To view in your map:

  1. In the Browser window, right click on the WMS/WMTS item and choose ‘New Connection…’
2.      A window will pop up. Give the new connection a name and paste the URL provided (contact nafi@cdu.edu.au if you have not received your URL):

3.Click OK and you will see the new WMTS connection appear in the Browser panel.

Click on the arrow next to the connection name to expand the layer list.

Double click and the layer will be displayed.

Clearing QGIS WMS/WMTS cache:

Sometimes you may notice the image content changes with the zoom level and the image changes to a kind of ‘blocky’ appearance (tiles). If this problem keeps occurring, you should shorten the cache expiry to a few hours, instead of days. To do this you will need to navigate to the QGIS option menus.

Select the ‘Network’ tab in the list of entries on the left. The cache expiry time is set here. We used WMTS protocol.   

5. Google drive URL for image downloads: You will be provided with a link to a Google Drive folder where you can download your imaery.

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