Geospatial Data in QGIS¶
In this course, you will learn to use QGIS to analyse and map different kinds of geospatial data.
Part 1 - Notebooks¶
The exercises for this module involve analysing data and creating maps using GIS. In order to understand what you are doing, you need to learn some of the key concepts in working with GIS and geospatial data - like what do we mean by “data”, what are the different kinds of geospatial data, how is it stored and accessed on the computer, what kinds of analysis are possible, and more.
So, I have compiled the background information into a series of online Notebooks. These have some explanatory text and sections of Python code which are run to illustrate various examples. Don’t worry - you don’t need to write, learn, or understand the Python code itself! It’s all pre-written. You only need to see what it produces.
There are two ways of using these Notebooks.
You can simply read them as an online book, looking at the explanatory text and the outputs (which are usually maps, or tables of data). In this case, you can pretty much ignore the code, and just look at what it produces.
You can run them interactively on Google Colab, to produce the results as you read.
Using Google Colab is easy and free - you don’t need to install anything, all you need is a Google account, and you can open it on any internet connected device. Running the Notebooks interactively on Google Colab is the far superior option, because it’s more interactive - plus, you can change things if you want to play around a bit to figure things out.
I know the temptation for many will be to think “well, there’s no marks for this” and either go through them just to go through them, or even skip them entirely. If you do this, and don’t actually use them to learn the concepts, then you really won’t understand what you’re doing in the exercises; they’ll be much harder, and will take you longer to complete than the time it would have taken to go through the Notebook content first and actually learn from them, and then do the exercises.
There are 10 Notebooks to work through. The first is just a written introduction - the other 9 contain code cells to run as well as the explanatory text.
Part 2 - GIS Exercise / Assignment¶
In this part, you will learn how to work with geospatial data in QGIS by working on a single research project about flooding in Ireland:
Research Question
What vulnerabilities to fluvial flooding exist in Ireland?
Aims
To inform future flood hazard mitigation planning
Objectives
Where is fluvial flooding most likely to occur in Ireland?
What is vulnerable to fluvial flooding most likely to occur in Ireland?
Is there a socioeconomic bias to who is vulnerable to fluvial flooding in Ireland?
You will choose an individual area to work on, get some data for that area, do some analysis of that data, and create some maps, in order to address these objectives and help to answer the research question.
The point of this exercise is to introduce you to geospatial analysis, to show you some of what’s possible using geospatial analysis, and to show you that you can do some geospatial analysis. Not everyone has the same targets - and so the way I’ve constructed this exercise breaks it down into different levels of tasks depending on what standard you are aiming to achieve, which I’ve labelled as “Basic”, “Developing”, and “Competent”.
From the Part 1 Notebooks, you should hopefully have some understanding of the difference between vector Point, Line, and Polygon data; attribute data; raster data; vector and raster geoprocessing; and of the potential for changing the symbology of the data, i.e. how the data is visualised.
For the “Basic” level, these exercises will lead you through the simplest version of each of these. The “Developing” version adds a little more complexity; and the “Competent” version will get you to the point where you could do real analysis.
The instructions here are broken down by which standard you’re aiming for. You can find the instructions here.