Generating Data for Small Operations in QGIS

Introduction and purpose

The purpose of this tutorial is to guide the layman through a basic QGIS process to generate a map product created using entirely free data and software. This tutorial assumes no prior familiarity with the software but does assume average computer literacy. For this tutorial you must know how to find and download software/data from the internet and be able to navigate file folders. The scenario used to facilitate this tutorial is that of a small farm with geospatial needs. The farm in this case is located far from any urban center, in northern Ontario, near the small village of Earlton, ON. The challenges to this farm in generating their own geospatial products are numerous but by using freely available data and software we can generate some basic map products that meet those needs.

The challenges that the small farm or business must overcome:

• Software: traditional GIS software is expensive, thankfully open source software has many of the same capabilities and can generate comparable products for free.
• Knowledge: taking the time to learn a whole new skill set in order to produce a basic map is not necessarily within the time or interest of the small business and hiring someone with that knowledge is expensive.
• Data: for rural locations there is often very little freely available data that is fine scale enough to be viable at the single acre resolution. Commissioning these data is expensive. Generating that data from your own GPS or Aerial images is a viable alternative.

Software and GPS

QGIS 3.8.3

Available for free at https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html select the latest version from the standalone installer. QGIS is free open source GIS mapping software. It will allow us to import all our data and generate our map.

GPS

If you own a GPS device you can go out a get specific coordinates for some of your points. GPS devices come in a wide price range, with the low end units being about 200$. If you do decide to import your own GPS points this tutorial will show you what tools in QGIS are needed but will not go over GPS functionality. A GPS can be a great asset in locating points and features that do not appear on an aerial image. When using a GPS you should also be aware of the accuracy of your unit. Many lower end GPS units have a +/- 3 meter error on single points. Familiarize yourself with your unit and know how well you can trust the points your generate.

Data sources

The data we will be using will be data we generate ourselves from the aerial images or from GPS coordinates we have gathered ourselves. In some cases you may be lucky enough to find open data from other sources such as the governments open data portal (https://open.canada.ca/en/open-maps). For the purposes of this tutorial we will be generating our own data since many of the data available through open sources is not high resolution enough for the small plot of land we are working with.