List of new features in GRASS GIS 7.6

NOTE: this page is a draft to start keeping track of the new features that will come with GRASS GIS 7.6.0

GRASS GIS 7.6 is actively developed and maintained with a first 7.6.0 stable release in January 2018. In total, it comes with more than XX fixes and improvements with respect to the previous stable releases 7.4.x. This page summarizes the manifold new features which have been added to GRASS 7.6.

What's new in a nutshell

After more than 1 year of development the new stable release GRASS GIS 7.6 is available. Efforts have concentrated on making the user experience even better, providing many new useful additional functionalities to modules and further improving the graphical user interface. Several modules were migrated from addons to the core GRASS GIS suite.

Releases

• See list here: Release/7.4.0-News (Jan 2018)
• The development was officially moved to a dedicated release branch on November 12, 2017 (r71701).

Graphical User Interface

GRASS GIS 7.6 graphical user interface comes with a new...

• G7:g.gui.tplot: now allows to set labels for title, x and y axes, and to export the plotted time series data in a CSV file

implement widget for SQL WHERE params wxGUI: make wx.BusyInfo? compatible with wxPython 4

Modules (commands)

A series of new modules has been added and many improved.

General modules

• G7:g.region: new grow option to increase or decrease the region extent in all directions.

Raster modules

New modules:

• r.path: extract a shortest path from the output of r.cost, r.walk, r.watershed
• r.buildvrt: build a virtual raster (VRT) that is a mosaic of the list of input raster maps
• ...

Several other raster modules have been improved with new options, flags or parallelization support:

• r.proj: new pipeline option for high-accuracy reprojection
• r.info: recognize different types of raster maps: raster (GRASS native), reclass (reclassification of another raster map), GDAL-link (GRASS link to a GDAL raster band), virtual (virtual mosaic of raster maps)
• r.mapcalc: new functions floor(), ceil() (#769)
• ...

Vector modules

The already impressive list of vector functions in GRASS GIS now includes two new modules that

Several other vector modules have been significantly improved with new options, flags, fixes and other enhancements:

• v.proj: new pipeline option for high-accuracy reprojection
• v.extract can now dissolve areas not only by category number, but also by attributes, at the same time preserving category values and attribute tables. This is an improvement over v.dissolve
• v.in.ogr converts now OpenStreetMap line topology to GRASS topology, inserting nodes where appropriate (​OSM vs GRASS topology)
• ...

Imagery modules

• ...

Temporal GIS modules

• G7:t.rast.algebra: new suffix option for map names

Scripting

...

User Manuals - Documentation

Translations

Translations are now managed in Transifex (please join and translate messages): ​https://www.transifex.com/grass-gis/grass72

User manual pages improvements

More than 130 User Manual pages have received major or minor improvements.

GRASS 7 Library changes

In the past year of development, there were several changes in different GRASS GIS libraries. The most relevant changes are described below:

• A new raster compression method has been added: ZSTD (​ZSTD, ​ZSTD on github). ZSTD is an improvement over ZLIB's deflate method, providing both faster and higher compression than ZLIB.
• a new raster map type has been added: GRASS virtual raster (VRT) which is a virtual mosaic of the list of input raster maps.
• support for PROJ 5: previously, reprojection from one CRS to another CRS used WGS84 as pivot datum: CRS1 -> WGS84 -> CRS2. This method provided reasonable results and allowed for reprojection on-the-fly. However, using a fixed pivot datum has been regarded as a suboptimal solution for coordinate reprojection, therefore a new mechanism has been introduced in PROJ 5, where custom pipelines for coordinate conversion and transformation can be defined. Together with the new PROJ 5+ API, this pipeline mechanism is now supported starting with proj-5.1.0. Custom coordinate conversion/transformation pipelines can now be defined for raster and vector reprojection.
• vector modules are now less "chatty" with regard to topology building: only problems are reported, standard topology building messages are only shown with --verbose. This should make it easier for users to spot problems.

Source Code Portability

• ...
• ...

GRASS GIS 7.6 Addons

There are twenty six 26 new addons that now enlarge the already impressive list of extensions available (see ​http://grass.osgeo.org/grass7/manuals/addons/).

Among these new extensions there is a set of components, i.signature.* to...

New addons to download and import Sentinel-2 imagery: i.sentinel.download and i.sentinel.import

Migrating from GRASS GIS 6 to version 7.x

• see here for changes in parameter names and changed flags
• see here for removed modules and renamed modules
• see here for renamed options