Acknowledgements

QGIS Riverscapes Studio or QRiS (pronounced curious) is a flagship, professional-grade tool of the Riverscapes Consortium. The free, open-source software is a plugin to the free, open-source QGIS software. The tool is targeted at anyone interested in understanding and analyzing their riverscape - including: practitioners, managers, analysts, researchers and students with some familiarity with GIS. It helps users with analysis, monitoring, assessment of riverscapes as well as preparation of the design and as-builts of low-tech process-based restoration designs.

QRiS is in Beta Testing and is only in the experimental plugin library of GIS. Version 1.0 will be released in late Spring 2023.

Funding

We are grateful to generous grant support from early adopters for the vision behind the Riverscape Studio at the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, NOAA Fisheries, NRCS Working Lands for Wildlife and Anabranch Solutions who funded the professional software development of QRiS. Without their support, this free software would not exist.

The US Forest Service, NOAA Fisheries, NRCS Working Lands for Wildlife and Anabranch Solutions were early supporters who paid for development of proof of concepts and Alpha pre-release versions of the code.

Specifically, the following supporters and visionaries behind the Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration made QRiS a reality by raising the funds to develop it.

• Alden Shalcross (BLM Montana-Dakotas),
• Scott Miller (BLM National),
• Jeremy Maestas (NRCS)
• Carl Saunders (US Forest Service)
• Chris Jordan (NOAA Fisheries)
• Nick Weber, Joe Wheaton, Steve Bennett and Nick Bouwes (Anabranch Solutions)

QRiS Development Team

QRiS is developed by North Arrow Research. The QRiS Development Team is led by Philip Bailey (Owner of North Arrow Research and Adjunct Professor at Utah State University), Joseph Wheaton (Professor of Riverscapes at Utah State University) and Nick Weber (Anabranch Solutions). The initial plugin was set up by Kelly Whitehead and the early releases bringing the LTPBR design functionality were developed by Nick Weber. See Contributors on GitHub for the full list of code contributors to QRiS.