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SAGA GIS

Saga GIS (System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses) is a GIS application for spatial data editing and GIS analyses.

Available

SAGA GIS is available:

Usage

It can be used with a graphical user interface, command line tools or through the R package Rsagacmd or RSAGA. Since the RSAGA package is no longer actively maintained and has not been tested on newer SAGA GIS versions, we recommend using Rsagacmd with SAGA GIS 7.9.0 and higher. For more information on running R jobs on Puhti or using RStudio, please see the r-env documentation.

For using SagaGIS, any of the modules listed about must be activated first, check the linked pages for details.

SAGA GIS command line interface

SAGA GIS command line tools can be used in an interactive session or batch jobs.

SAGA GIS command line interface with r-env module

r-env is an Apptainer container, which means the commands are slightly different compared to normal installations, basically all commands need to have apptainer_wrapper exec before the usual command.

You can test that SAGA GIS loaded successfully and print the command line tools help information with

apptainer_wrapper exec saga_cmd -h

SAGA GIS command line interface with qgis module

With qgis module SagaGIS commands can be used normally, for example:

saga_cmd -h

SAGA GIS Graphical User Interface

SAGA GIS Graphical User Interface in Puhti

The easiest option for using SAGA GIS is to open it in Puhti web interface as Desktop app.

  1. Log in to Puhti web interface.
  2. Start SNAP: Apps -> Desktop, choose Desktop: 'single application' and App: 'SAGA GIS'
  3. The SNAP GUI is started automatically when the Desktop is launched.

Alternatively, especially if you want to use SAGA GIS together with some other GUI tool or want to user older version, SAGA GIS can be started in Puhti web interface with remote desktop:

  1. Log in to Puhti web interface.
  2. Open Remote desktop: Apps -> Desktop, choose Desktop: mate or xfce.
  3. After launcing the remote desktop, double-click SAGA GIS icon OR open Host Terminal (Desktop icon) and start SAGA GIS:
module load r-env
apptainer_wrapper exec saga_gui

SAGA GIS Graphical User Interface in LUMI

Until LUMI web interface is available, SagaGIS needs to be used with SSH X11 forwarding.

module use /appl/local/csc/modulefiles
module load qgis
saga_gui

License and acknowledgement

SAGA GIS is published under the GPL license.

Please acknowledge CSC and Geoportti in your publications, it is important for project continuation and funding reports. As an example, you can write "The authors wish to thank CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland (urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072531) and the Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (Geoportti, urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072513) for computational resources and support".

References