Calculate Height Above the Nearest Drainage (HAND) with QGIS using the PCRaster Tools Plugin

With the PCRaster Tools plugin you can calculate the Height Above the Nearest Drainage (HAND). First we calculate the local drain drain direction. Then we determine the drainage using the flow accumulation. We give the drainage pixels a unique id for which we determine their catchments. Then calculate the difference between the elevation of a pixel and the elevation of the outlet of the catchment of the pixel.

Reference :
Renno, C. D., Nobre, A. D., Cuartas, L. A., Soares, J. V., Hodnett, M. G., Tomasella, J., & Waterloo, M. J. (2008). HAND, a new terrain descriptor using SRTM-DEM: Mapping terra-firme rainforest environments in Amazonia. Remote Sensing of Environment, 112(9), 3469-3481.

#QGIS #PCRaster #QGISHydro

[florindanoula]

Thanks a lot. This Video helps me to find my way👍

[rchlumsk]

Highly useful video and great set of tools, thanks!

[josephbergholz]

Hi! This helped me a lot, thanks for the video! After all this I need to use a vector of the rivers as a mask over another map, but instead of giving me a raster with the rivers as a line it gives me the whole area of the project. I would really appreciate any help.

[WilliamProcter-dh]

Thanks for this. This is exactly what i was looking for. However, when i try to run the "lddcreate" tool, it takes forever and eventually crashes QGIS. I have also tried running directly in pthon and have the same issue - there is no error retuned, it just doesn't finish. Any help would be much appreciated

[yancheng]

while calculating ddl, I received this error -> PCRaster library is not available. Do you perhaps know why?

[casherasmussen]

How did you determine the flow accumulation threshold?