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I have a raster, and I'm trying to create a polygon and export to a shapefile that is showing one solid layer between lets say 1000m and 3000m in elevation.

So it seems like I need to filter out all the data outside of those elevations, but I'm not sure how to go about that.

How do I do this using GDAL in Python?

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    You could try gdal_calc -A your_raster -calc"logical_or(A>1000,A<3000) " based on this post gis.stackexchange.com/questions/204387/… that should make a binary raster with 0 and 1, polygonize the binary raster - it's less intensive than a continuous raster.
    – Michael Stimson
    May 9, 2018 at 4:11
  • What does the A represent?
    – m0ngr31
    May 9, 2018 at 4:52
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    A is your raster, specified by -A.. this allows you to have multiple rasters in the calculation -A first_raster -B second_raster etc.. then in the calc you can specify A operator B (-calc "A+B" for example), read about it gdal.org/gdal_calc.html
    – Michael Stimson
    May 9, 2018 at 5:19
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    Is your gdal raster binary? How are you exporting to a shapefile? This might help docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/training_manual/complete_analysis/… get you back on track.
    – Michael Stimson
    May 9, 2018 at 5:59
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    Feel free to put in your own answer with screen shots and links based on any direction you've gleaned from my comments and I'll upvote it tomorrow when I get back in.
    – Michael Stimson
    May 9, 2018 at 6:09

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After playing around with the links Michael gave me above, this ended up being the solution:

gdal_calc.py -A idaho.tif --outfile=idaho-filtered.tif --calc="1*logical_and(A>=1000,A<3000)" --NoDataValue=0
gdal_polygonize.py idaho-filtered.tif -f "ESRI Shapefile" idaho-filtered.shp idaho-filtered

Here's the results...

Original: enter image description here

After gdal_calc: enter image description here

Shapefile: enter image description here

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    Excellent, especially the section about --NoDataValue=0 to eliminate the polygons you're not interested in. If you have the time can you put in a screen shot of the original idaho.tif, binary idaho-filtered.tif and the resulting polygon.
    – Michael Stimson
    May 9, 2018 at 22:23
  • Thank you! I had a lot of trouble finding how to do that!
    – Tristram Gräbener
    Dec 30, 2019 at 18:18

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