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I am trying to get my head around what I think is a fairly straight forward geoprocessing problem:

I have created a polygon contour layer. However the polygon features are stacked on top of each other rather than having individual donut like features. Now when I use opacity some areas are thicker than others, due to the stacking of features, and I can't get a nice result (screenshot attached).

Any ideas which QGIS function and settings to use to resolve this? I came across this approach but it seems rather complicated for what I think should be a straightforward process: Exploding overlapping to new non-overlapping polygons?

enter image description here

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  • Have you tried the Union tool with the single layer?
    – Stu Smith
    Commented Aug 8, 2020 at 4:58
  • I have now. This goes in the right direction, but while it seems to cut the features, it still retains them all in the same layer. This means I can get my desired output, but only if I start manually deleting features. In this case it was 76 of them. Feasible for a once off on a small scale, but not really a solution for larger and more layers. Any other ideas? A second tool I could run to remove all the overlapping features?
    – Benj
    Commented Aug 9, 2020 at 23:26
  • Can you make your data available for download, so others can test?
    – Stu Smith
    Commented Aug 11, 2020 at 14:40
  • Also, I'm confused when you say "... it still retains them in the same layer." That sounds as if you want each separate polygon to be output to its own separate layer. I'm also puzzled about the 76 deletions; its hard to visualize!
    – Stu Smith
    Commented Aug 11, 2020 at 14:44
  • Example file can be downloaded here: filebin.net/lbpsu7tcxuxr44u8 What I meant is that union seemed to cut the features apart, but I still had the issue that they were stacked on top of each other. So in order to get a clean layer with no stacked/overlapping features, I would have to delete lots of individual features manually until only the ones I want are left. Not sure if that is better explained? :) Hopefully looking at the file helps...
    – Benj
    Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 4:54

1 Answer 1

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Ok, I took a look at your geojson data. I'm responding with an answer only because it allows me to include screenshots. I'm not sure I'll be able to solve your problem but here goes...

I loaded the geojson file into QGIS 3.14.1 and styled it categorically using _TEMP with random colors and Layer Rendering > Opacity set to 40%. The resulting layer displays over the satellite imagery with (what looks like to me) correct opacity. I'm not sure why I'm getting opacity across the layer and you are not, but perhaps this solves your problem:

enter image description here

But if I read between the lines of your post I get the idea that you're also concerned about the polygon stacking. I agree that you have stacked polygons. For example, in the following screenshot I clicked on the far western (magenta) polygon using the Select Features tool. This highlighted the selected area in yellow, and the attribute table shows two polygons selected, which indicates that you have a multipolygon feature structure:

enter image description here

The two selected (stacked) polygons have different _TEMP values (I assume that you're attribute of interest is _TEMP). But do you want two different values for the same polygon area? Perhaps one of those values is incorrect, and you'd like to delete the offending polygon, leaving just the single correct polygon. Alternatively, both values may be correct and you'd like to retain them, but with the ability to select either one by itself. In either case, try the Vector > Geometry Tools > Multipart to Singleparts tool.

Note that the singlepart output now contains 62 polygons, versus the original multipart's 34; the "stacked" polygons have been decoupled. The singlepart design allows you to isolate individual polygons (whether originally stacked or not) for deletion (via editing) or display.

enter image description here

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  • Awesome, thanks for this! You are correct that the TEMP column is the one I am interested in and I did not pick up on the fact that the overlaying polygons have different values. That should not be the case. Which leads me to think that I am doing something wrong in the previous step where I generate the polygons and populate the attribute data. So I'll go back one step and try to fix that up...
    – Benj
    Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 23:40
  • Glad that I could help. Happy mapping!
    – Stu Smith
    Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 20:58

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