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GWN Technologies - MERIT Training Drones & Mapping with QGIS

This web/blog contains a series of short tutorials developed for the MERIT and SESMIM projects in Mongolia on the use of drones for mapping and GIS. It focuses on FOSS4G and free to use applications like QGIS and OpenDroneMap (ODM) to process the drone images and to create updated maps for landuse, agriculture, conservation, environmental and social planning. (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)) GWN is continuing to update the content to help other international NGOs.

DJI Phantom 3 P and Mavic Pro radio controller

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July 24, 2018

DJI radio controllers

Phantom 3 Advanced/Professional

Mavic Pro

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DJI Mini 2 SE/4K Mapping Tutorial

September 25, 2025

DJI Mini 2 SE /4K Mapping Tutorial Low cost drone mapping approach DJI no longer provides SDK tools with their lower cost general purpose drones like the DJI mini series. This means that users will have to use the DJI Fly application to control their drones. Android and iOS apps like Litchi, DroneLink, Map Pilot Pro, etc. cannot directly control the low cost DJI drones like the mini 4K with their apps. This makes mapping with their low end drones more difficult. However it is still possible with some work arounds. You can use your DJI drone for mapping by followint the YouTube's "Turn your DJI Drone into a mapping machine for free!" video tutorial by Dylan Gorman. You will need to create a default kmz file on the DJI Fly app and manually overwrite that with your mapping kmz file created with the Map Pilot Pro (Maps Made Easy) app of the mission you want to complete. Note: the limitation also holds for this approach because DJI does not work with the kmz files for their...

Georeference an unreferenced image with QGIS

August 14, 2018

Introduction It is important to learn how to georeference an unregistered image such as an air photo or planimetric map so that you could use it with your GIS data. If you are using OpenDroneMap or Agisoft Photoscan to process the air photos from the drone you will get a georeferenced orthophoto as an output. This referenced or rectified image can be imported into QGIS and it will automatically be positioned in the coordinate reference system (CRS) that you used to process the photos. For example UTM Zone 49 for the Sukhbaatar aimag area. You should use a projected coordinate system for air photos instead of geographic coordinates. If you used Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) to mosaic the photos, the exported image will not have a coordinate reference system attached to it. To use it with a GIS application you will need to georeference or register the map to a CRS. You can georeference your image with the Georeferencer GDAL plugin for QGIS. To georeference an image you w...

Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE)

August 09, 2018

The following tutorial covers the use of Microsoft Research's Image Composite Editor or ICE for drone mapping. Background Our initial goal was to use Open Drone Map (ODM) a FOSS4G application to create orthophotos from the autonomous drone images using DroneDeploy. At our training workshop we discovered that only three PC Workstations were able to install ODM. The remaining systems did not have enough computing capacity to process orthophotos. As a result an alternative was needed and we decided that MS ICE (free application) is a viable alternative for the majority there. Mongolian: https://trainingquadcopters.blogspot.com/2018/07/opendronemap-with-docker-toolbox-for.html English: https://trainingquadcopters.blogspot.com/2018/06/opendronemap-with-docker-toolbox-on.html Applications like ODM and Agisoft Photoscan automatically uses the EXIF coordinates in the drone photos to georeference the orthophoto map, ICE does not. ICE uses blending technology to stitch the...