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QGIS MCP

A geospatial data toolbox for QGIS. The Data Explorer brings live satellite imagery, weather, elevation and OpenStreetMap data into your project with a few clicks, and a permission gated Model Context Protocol server lets Claude and other AI agents drive the same engine.

Explore the world's open data from inside QGIS, and let AI assist with full control in your hands.

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Data Explorer: open data in QGIS without any AI

You do not need Claude, an API key or an MCP client to use this toolbox. The Data Explorer is a dock panel inside QGIS. Pick an area, click a button, and the data arrives as a layer in your project.

<p align="center"> <img src="docs/images/explorer_0_overview.png" width="31%" alt="Overview tab: one click buttons for the current map view"> <img src="docs/images/explorer_7_land_and_soil.png" width="31%" alt="Land and Soil tab: WorldCover, land use, surface water, SoilGrids"> <img src="docs/images/explorer_10_analysis.png" width="31%" alt="Analysis tab: change detection, per polygon statistics, time lapse, report"> </p> <p align="center"> <img src="docs/images/explorer_1_fields.png" width="31%" alt="Fields tab: per field vigour, change and status with a ranked attention list"> <img src="docs/images/explorer_12_sensors.png" width="31%" alt="Sensors tab: river gauges, buoys, tides, aircraft and SensorThings servers"> <img src="docs/images/explorer_13_monitor.png" width="31%" alt="Monitor tab: feeds refreshed on a timer with threshold alerts"> </p>

Open it: the Data Explorer toolbar button (globe icon), Plugins > QGIS MCP > Data Explorer, or the Open Data Explorer button at the top of the QGIS MCP server panel. It also opens by itself the first time QGIS starts after an install or upgrade.

Choose the area of interest in any of five ways (until you do, the current map view is used): type a place name and a radius, press Draw on map and drag a rectangle, use the current map view, use a layer's extent, or use the selected features of a layer. The area is outlined in orange on the canvas and remembered between sessions.

Then work through the tabs. Every fetch runs in the background with a progress bar and a Cancel button, so QGIS never freezes.

| Tab | What you can do with clicks | | --- | --- | | Overview | The front door: your map view is the area until you choose one, and nine one click buttons give a quick look card (weather now, seven day forecast, elevation, land cover shares, population, topsoil), the latest clear Sentinel-2 image, NDVI, the land cover map, a DEM, surface temperature, the population grid, the last 30 days of rain and a PDF report | | Fields | Pick any polygon layer of fields, parcels or blocks: the selection (or the fields inside the area) gets the vegetation index from the newest clear scene, the value a month earlier, the change, acres and a status (bare or harvested, low vigour, declining, healthy, greening), written to a new styled layer with a ranked list of fields needing attention and the last 30 days of rain and ET0; a six month time series with a chart for one field; a PDF field report | | Imagery | Search Sentinel-2, Landsat or Sentinel-1 scenes by date and cloud cover; stream true colour or chosen bands; compute NDVI, EVI, SAVI, NDWI, MNDWI, NDMI, NDBI, NBR, BSI or your own band expression with cloud masking; build a time series of any index | | Weather | Current conditions, a seven day forecast, air quality, daily history back to 1940, NASA POWER agro climatology; climate projections to 2050 from seven CMIP6 models; a seasonal outlook up to nine months; attach live weather fields to every feature of a layer | | Elevation | Copernicus DEM 30 m for the area; slope, aspect, hillshade, roughness, TRI and TPI; elevation profiles across the area or along a selected road or river, with a chart | | OpenStreetMap | Twenty one presets (hospitals, schools, roads, buildings, farmland, rivers, parks, power lines and more) or any custom tag, as points or full geometry | | Hazards | USGS earthquakes by period and magnitude; NASA FIRMS active fires with a free key; NASA EONET natural events (storms, wildfires, floods, volcanoes, sea ice, dust) | | Land and Soil | Twenty global rasters clipped to the area: ESA WorldCover, Esri land use, CCI land cover, forest map, surface water, four elevation models, MODIS land surface temperature, NDVI, leaf area, evapotranspiration, productivity, snow and burned area, biomass, biodiversity intactness, electrification and Meta's 30 m population grid, each with class shares or statistics; population of the area from WorldPop with an age pyramid; SoilGrids texture, pH, carbon and nitrogen at a point or attached to a layer | | Water | GloFAS river discharge forecast and history, sea state and sea surface temperature, elevation at the area's centre and corners | | Boundaries and Species | Administrative units of any country from geoBoundaries, GBIF species observations by taxon, Sensor.Community and OpenAQ air quality stations, GDACS disaster alerts | | Analysis | Change detection between two periods with loss and gain shares, per polygon index statistics for any layer, dated scene series for the Temporal Controller, and a one click HTML or PDF area report with map, weather, elevation, land cover, soil and NDVI | | 3D | OpenStreetMap buildings fetched and extruded by their height or storey tags, any footprint layer extruded, a DEM set as terrain, USGS lidar point clouds streamed as COPC (United States) or any COPC URL, Cesium 3D Tiles scenes (Google Photorealistic with a key, or any tileset URL), and a new 3D map view opened with one click | | Sensors | USGS river gauges with discharge and stage, NOAA buoys with waves and wind, NOAA tide stations with water levels, aircraft positions right now from OpenSky, and any OGC SensorThings server (Hamburg, Dutch Samen Meten, or your own) as a live layer, whole server or area only | | Monitor | Earthquakes, air sensors, weather, GDACS alerts and NASA events refreshed on a timer for the area, with thresholds you set; alerts land in the QGIS message bar and a table | | Basemaps | OpenStreetMap, Esri imagery and topo, CARTO, OpenTopoMap, and NASA GIBS daily satellite layers by date | | Sources | Every data source with its licence and whether it needs a key; paste keys here | | Log | A timestamped record of everything the panel did |

Every layer the panel creates carries provenance metadata (source, query, time, licence) and fetched vectors are written to GeoPackage, so they survive saving the project. All sources are public and keyless except NASA FIRMS, OpenAQ and Google 3D Tiles, which need free keys.

QGIS MCP server: an AI assistant for QGIS

QGIS MCP is a QGIS AI assistant built on the Model Context Protocol. It runs a small socket bridge inside QGIS and a standalone MCP server beside it, so an MCP client such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code can inspect and operate your QGIS session in plain language.

If you work with geospatial data, you can ask things like:

• "Load the district shapefile, filter it to Sugarcane parcels and tell me how many remain."
• "Which CRS does this unlabelled layer most likely use? Show me a render to confirm."
• "Run a buffer, clip it to the study area, and export the result to GeoPackage."
• "Check this layer for invalid geometries and duplicates, then summarise the problems."
• "Render the map and let me see it."
• "Find the least cloudy Sentinel-2 scene over Multan this month, compute NDVI for the farms, and tell me which fields look stressed."
• "Add the hospitals in this district from OpenStreetMap and attach today's temperature to each one."
• "Stream the 30 m DEM for the valley, derive a hillshade, and put it under the roads."

What sets it apart from a plain "run any code" bridge is safety. Every command carries a risk category (read, write, destructive, code). A permission profile decides whether each category is allowed, needs your approval, or is refused. Every command that reaches the dispatcher lands in an append only audit log, so you can always answer "what did the AI change?".

This is a Claude QGIS integration and a general Model Context Protocol GIS server. Any client that speaks the Model Context Protocol can use it.

Table of contents

• Data Explorer: open data in QGIS without any AI
• Features
• Architecture
• Installation
• Connect your MCP client
• Tool reference
• Permission profiles
• Wire protocol (NDJSON)
• Running the tests
• Roadmap
• FAQ and troubleshooting
• Contributing
• Credits
• License and attribution

Features

Project

• Create, load and save .qgz projects; read project info and set the project CRS.

Layers

• Add vector and raster layers, create in memory scratch layers with typed fields, remove or reload layers.
• Layer visibility, opacity, extent, field listing, CRS repair (set_layer_crs) and CRS detection (detect_layer_crs).
• Export vector layers to GeoPackage, GeoJSON, Shapefile or CSV.

Analysis (PyQGIS automation without writing PyQGIS)

• Exact feature counts, distinct values with counts, field statistics (min, max, sum, mean, median, stdev).
• SQL across project layers through virtual layers (execute_sql), grouped aggregates, geometry validity checks, duplicate finding.

Editing

• Add features from attributes and WKT, update values, delete features, add, rename and delete fields, build spatial indexes.
• Destructive edits dry run by default and report how many rows would change; they apply only with confirm=true.

Raster

• Band statistics and point sampling (get_raster_statistics, sample_raster_values).

Processing

• Discover algorithms, read their parameter help, and run any QGIS Processing algorithm.

Rendering and layouts

• Render the canvas to a file, or return it inline as an image the model can look at (render_map_image).
• List and export print layouts to PDF or image.

Safety and permissions

• Four permission profiles, a non blocking approval queue, temporary per command grants, an optional pairing token, a loopback only listener, and an opt in code execution tier.
• Unknown commands are treated as destructive, so a newly added command fails closed.

Audit

• JSONL audit trail of every dispatched command (verdict, client, status, truncated params, duration), readable through get_audit_log.

Data Explorer dashboard (no AI required)

• A dock panel inside QGIS