[Feat] Basemaps & New Locations

[baharmon]

The lack of basemaps makes it challenging to find a new location While QGIS (with plugins like Quick Map Services), ArcGIS, and of course Google Earth have basemaps to help users find study areas or to simply just explore, with GRASS you need to first download data. In my opinion, this is a major obstacle to new users adopting GRASS GIS. It is hard for novices to start a new project in GRASS. Even with web mapping services in GRASS, you need to first set your region, i.e. you need to know (the coordinates of) where you are interested. Plugins like r.in.usgs are very useful, but require some contextual data to be imported first so that one can find and set the computational region.

Possible Solutions?

• Integrate streaming web map services as basemaps into the Map Display. Default list of core WMS. Option to set region and download wms data.
• Include a global basemap in GRASS that can be added as a basemap in the Map Display.
• Create a new location interface in GRASS Start Up has a (streaming?) global basemap to help users find their study region and suggests suitable coordinate systems / map projections.
• Sample datasets for the world, continents, and states with enough context data to find study regions.

[ninsbl]

Having global WMS predefined would be nice (and could be used for tests as well).

[veroandreo]

This would be very nice to have, or the XYZ tiles :) The later is mainly why I use QGIS when I use it. They render pretty fast and allow to explore areas and/or save desired regions so much easily than the Add web service layer in GRASS GUI.