Profiling terrain
Terrain profiles are cross-sections of a particular piece of terrain that provides information on the slope, elevation along the line of interest. QGIS has a 'terrain profile' plugin that can be used to create cross-sections for this purpose.
This view shows the location of the plugin icon to activate it. I have a number of layers in this project, where the ortho is at the top and there's one DEM. For the purpose of demonstration, I use the hillshade raster as a second DEM to visualize two lines in the same graph (unfortunately didn't give it a different color).
This can be a supporting tool to visualize the terrain profile before/after in combination with the 2D "DEM difference" map that visualizes the amount of excavation and fill from the top.
There's a vector layer that describes the cutout lines, which is useful to include in another map of the report to demonstrate what the cross-section is from.
Unfortunately you can't generate a set of profiles from this plugin as a batch operation, so you have to click another profile line, adjust scale, save the graph with a proper filename and work forward from there and at the end combine all the results together.
Tools that have more direct and easier to use functions for terrain profiling:
- Virtual surveyor
- ...