A QGIS plugin to access raster data on GeoCubes Finland, maintained by Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI).
What is GeoCubes Finland?
GeoCubes Finland is a harmonized, multi-resolution raster geodata repository. The repository contains several key national datasets on themes such as elevation, land cover and forestry. Read more at the GeoCubes Finland main site: http://86.50.168.160/geocubes
Harmonized simply means that the data is as simple to access and use as can be. All of the data is in the same coordinate system, is georeferenced uniformly and is available as either a GeoTIFF image or a VRT virtual file. The data is available in resolutions ranging from 1 to 1000 meters and can be cropped flexibly with e.g. a bounding box or administrative area boundaries. All of this means that accessing raster datasets is easier than ever before.
Who’s the service for and who can use it?
GeoCubes Finland has been created under the oGIIR project and as such, is aimed to support the needs of Finnish research community. However, the service and its data is freely usable by anyone interested.
GeoCubes Finland plugin
This QGIS 3.x plugin enables using all of the abovementioned features effortlessly in your QGIS 3 installation. Simply select three parameters: raster layers to download, cropping method and raster resolution. Crop with a bounding box, administrative areas or draw a polygon to crop with. Then select either GeoTIFF or VRT file. After download, a layer is added to QGIS, where you can use it for further analysis. You may use files from the GeoCubes Finland server or save files to local storage: the former suits quick analysis on smaller rasters and the latter is beneficial for larger files.
Take a look at the video introducing GeoCubes Finland and the plugin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWAHyrBS0gk
Instructions for the plugin usage are available at Geoportti GitHub: https://github.com/geoportti/GeoCubes-Finland-QGIS-Plugin