QGIS
The free, open-source GIS that has become the default spatial platform for water engineers worldwide.
500+ fast geospatial analysis tools with the best DEM hydrology toolkit in open source.
by Whitebox Geospatial Inc.
Install
pip install whiteboxWhiteboxTools, from John Lindsay's Geomorphometry and Hydrogeomatics lab at the University of Guelph, packs over five hundred geoprocessing tools into a single fast Rust binary — and its hydrological terrain analysis is the deepest available anywhere: depression breaching (its least-cost breaching is the reference implementation), flow pointers and accumulation in many flavours, stream extraction, wetness indices and lidar processing.
It runs standalone, from Python, or inside QGIS/ArcGIS via frontends, with no dependencies to install. For DEM conditioning and delineation pipelines, WhiteboxTools is usually the sharpest free tool in the drawer.
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