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

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.

Data sources

Google satellite images