I'm Hans van der Kwast. With more than 20 years of experience with GIS and Remote Sensing in education and projects, I'm now offering consultancy, training and coaching in open source GIS. I'm an active member in the QGIS community, a QGIS certified trainer, and board member of the Dutch QGIS User Group. I've established the GIS OpenCourseWare platform for sharing free course materials on QGIS, Python, Mergin Maps, Google Earth Engine and much more. The PCRaster Tools plugin for QGIS that I've developed has been downloaded more than 90k times. Furthermore, I'm co-author of the book QGIS for Hydrological Applications and I have a YouTube Channel with more than 30k subscribers. As a member of QCooperative, I'm well connected with the best open source GIS developers.
I offer online consultancy on GIS work flows with QGIS, Mergin Maps, Python, PCRaster, WebODM, GDAL and other open source software.
I create online tailor-made training on open source GIS software and Python. For QGIS I provide the official QGIS certificate.
I provide online coaching sessions to beginning and more advanced GIS professionals. Topics for coaching could be on open source business model development, marketing or GIS career development.
Check my YouTube Channel, QwastTube and the GIS OpenCourseWare platform for free videos and step-by-step tutorials. These come without support and without certificates.
On 30 October 2026, QGIS 4.4 is released, and for the first time it ships with native hydrology tools in QGIS core. No extra providers to install, no dependency headaches: flow direction, Strahler order, channel networks, drainage basins, upslope areas and thin plate spline interpolation are right there in the Processing Toolbox.
With my new QGIS plugin AHN Streamer, you can look at the AHN point cloud of any place in the Netherlands in a few clicks, without downloading a single file.
I've released a new QGIS plugin: the Map Algebra Calculator. It's a raster calculator in the spirit of the familiar QGIS Raster Calculator, but you choose the engine that does the work: PCRaster map algebra, the GDAL raster calculator (numpy syntax) or GRASS r.mapcalc.
Last week the international QGIS community gathered in Laax, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden: the QGIS User Conference on 5 and 6 October, followed by the 29th QGIS Contributor Meeting from 7 to 9 October.