Workshop: A Brief Introduction to QGIS

QGIS is a powerful open-source Geographic Information System platform with a bit of a learning curve...

Welcome to the Wild World of Desktop GIS tools

QGIS (and its assoicate ArcGIS Pro/Desktop) are powerful tools used for a wide variety of purposes across many fields. And GIS in general is a huge subject, with entire degrees/certificate programs devoted to it. As such, we will barely scratch the surface in this workshop, but by the end you will be able to:

1. Understand a bit about the QGIS interface;

2. Search for and add pre-created basemaps;

3. Add your own georeferenced raster data;

4. Import basic vector datasets from csvs, shapefiles, and geojsons;

5. Create a new vector dataset from scratch;

6. Perform some basic styling of data;

7. Prepare your data for export.

That's a lot....lets get started!

For those interested in diving deeper, I highly reccomend reading the thorough QGIS Handbook; much of the below is taken from there and the step-by-step Training Manual. Links to specific parts of the handbook are referenced above.