How do I find overlapping attributes in two different layers?

Question

I have two layers - one with country borders, and one with river basin borders - and I need to find a way to generate a list of basins that occur in each country. Is there a way to find overlapping attributes (basins and countries) from two different layers? Ultimately I need to generate a list of river basins for each country that I can copy/export to Excel.

Thanks! Cyrus

Answer 1

What you want to do is called a Spatial Join.

A common GIS task is to join the attributes from one spatial data layer to another. In this example we will join the attribute table from a polygon layer to a points layer, based on which polygon contains the points.

In QGIS, you can do that by using the JOIN ATTRIBUTES BY LOCATION TOOL.

You can then set your target and join vector layers.

I suggest that you set the river basins as the target vector layer and countries as the join layer. That way, your output would be a basins shapefile with the attributes of the countries shapefile. You could then generate your list from there.