An Introduction to GRASS GIS and Tangible Landscape (CSDMS Workshop 2025)

This is a set of Jupyter Notebooks for a workshop at CSDMS's 2025 Annual Meeting.

How to run these notebooks

The notebooks can be run locally if users installs GRASS GIS along with Jupyter Lab, folium or ipyleaflet, and a git client on their computer. All notebooks are also available to run on EarthscapeHub.

Click this button:

to open the lessons directly on the EarthscapeHub lab instance!

Note: The EarthscapeHub lab instance is password-protected. Please contact your instructor about obtaining a login, or visit this CSDMS wiki page for more information.

Once you are in EarthscapeHub, open a terminal and clone this repository using:

git clone https://github.com/ncsu-geoforall-lab/csdms-grass-2025.git

Workshop Agenda

Part 1 (10 min): Quick Introduction

• What is GRASS and why use it

Part 2 (50 min): Getting Started with GRASS

• Notebook 1: Getting Started

• Notebook 2: Swine Lagoons Case Study

Break (10 min)

Part 3 (50 min): Creating Tangible Landscape Activities

• Notebook 3: Scripting for Tangible Landscape

• Live Demo with Tangible Landscape

Authors

  

• Pratikshya Regmi, NCSU Center for Geospatial Analytics
• Caitlin Haedrich, NCSU Center for Geospatial Analytics

Workshop Abstract

This hands-on clinic will introduce participants to GRASS GIS, an open-source geospatial processing engine, and Tangible Landscape, a tangible user interface for GRASS GIS. We will explain and practice GRASS GIS concepts, and work through example Python-based workflows for topics such as hydrology, flood modeling, and viewshed analysis. These workflows will be implemented as a series of computational notebooks. Then, we will show how these workflows can be configured as activities on Tangible Landscape. Using GRASS GIS as a backend, Tangible Landscape is an interactive, open-source platform that integrates physical sand models of landscapes with digital simulations by using a scanner (xBox Kinect) and projector. It allows users to interact in real-time with models by, for example, carving the sand and seeing the resulting water flow pattern.

By the end of the clinic, participants will have hands-on experience with:

• Setting up GRASS projects and importing data
• Visibility analysis
• Configuring and running overland flow models
• Creating timeseries of inundation flooding
• Building Tangible Landscape activities

License

This material is dual licensed under GNU FDL 1.3 and CC BY-SA 4.0.