GIS analysis of geological surfaces orientations: the qgSurf plugin for QGIS
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Scientific Computing and Simulation, Spatial and Geographic Information Systems
- Keywords
- GIS, Structural geology, Field mapping, Geological surfaces
- Copyright
- © 2019 Alberti
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. GIS analysis of geological surfaces orientations: the qgSurf plugin for QGIS. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27694v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27694v1
Abstract
GIS techniques enable the quantitative analysis of geological structures. In particular, topographic traces of geological lineaments can be compared with the theoretical ones for geological planes, to determine the best fitting theoretical planes. qgSurf, a Python plugin for QGIS, implements this kind of processing, in addition to the determination of the best-fit plane to a set of topographic points, the calculation of the distances between topographic traces and geological planes and also basic stereonet plottings. By applying these tools to a case study of a Cenozoic thrust lineament in the Southern Apennines (Calabria, Southern Italy), we deduce the approximate orientations of the lineament in different fault-delimited sectors and calculate the misfits between the theoretical orientations and the actual topographic traces.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.