GIS software

In general, we recommend using QGIS to view RiskScape shapefile results. All the example tutorial input data that is provided alongside the RiskScape documentation has been tested with QGIS and is known to work.

For more details on installing QGIS, refer to Installing a GIS application.

Workarounds for ArcGIS

If you are using ArcGIS, then shapefile data may sometimes appear to be projected incorrectly. ArcGIS does not seem to recognize the open standards (OGC) format used for some shapefile .prj files.

Here are some workarounds in the meantime, while we investigate a better interoperability solution with ArcGIS.

  • This projection issue seems to be limited to shapefiles. Other file formats, such a GeoPackage or GeoJSON, should be projected in ArcGIS correctly.

  • You can set the projection manually in ArcGIS. If you are unsure what projection a shapefile uses, you can use the riskscape bookmark info FILENAME command. The CRS (Coordinate Reference System) code used in the file is displayed in the output, e.g.

    ...
Axis-order  : long,lat / X,Y / Easting,Northing
CRS code    : EPSG:4326
...

  • You can usually change the format that the RiskScape model results are saved in fairly easily. For example, the riskscape model run MODELNAME --format geopackage command will produce a GeoPackage results file instead of a shapefile. This .gpkg file can be more reliably projected in ArcGIS. Note that any example riskscape model run commands will typically result in the default shapefile format being used - you will have to add --format geopackage onto the end of the example command yourself.

  • You can use RiskScape to change the format of most geospatial files. For example, to convert shapefile input data into a GeoPackage file, you can use the command riskscape bookmark evaluate SHAPEFILE_PATH --format geopackage