Introduction

0.1 Prerequisites

This course uses QGIS and Canadian examples to give a brief introduction to geographic information systems. QGIS is an open-source GIS platform available for all major platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. This course was written using QGIS 2.18.2 for Mac OSX, however it is expected that this tutorial is valid from QGIS 2.14 up to future versions of QGIS. To use this course, you will need to install QGIS and download the course data.

0.1.1 Installing QGIS

QGIS downloads are available from the QGIS download page (https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html). Instructions on the website are fairly complete, but the process is slightly different based on platform. For this tutorial, you will need QGIS Version 2.18 LTR (not 3.0, which may work for some of the examples but is still in the early phase of adoption).

0.1.1.1 Windows

Windows users should use the “QGIS Standalone Installer 64 bit” download, and when opening QGIS, use the QGIS with GRASS shortcut on the desktop.

0.1.1.2 MacOSX

Mac users should download the .dmg file, open it, and install the packages in the order that they are indicated (they are numbered 01, 02, etc.). In order to install the packages, you will need to right-click on each package and choose Open, then choose Continue to install the package.

0.1.1.3 Linux

Occasionally, the distribution (e.g., Ubuntu) will have a version of QGIS in its software repository. While this version will work for many of the modules in this tutorial, I highly reccomend using the “Release with ubuntugis dependencies” repository to install QGIS, SAGA, and GRASS with Ubuntu. You will also need to add the QGIS certificate to your keychain, which you can do using:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key CAEB3DC3BDF7FB45

To install QGIS and dependencies, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qgis python-qgis qgis-plugin-grass

0.1.2 Course Data

This course uses a series of minimal examples to illustrate common tasks in QGIS. The data for these examples is available for download at the tutorial website. You should extract this ZIP file to location you can find easily before starting this course (I use the Desktop; you can always move the course folder somewhere else later).

0.2 Philosophy

There are many excellent reference guides to QGIS, and much high-quality coures material available for teaching GIS and learning QGIS software. This course is designed to be a lightweight introduction to QGIS software to build a basic proficiency in GIS and GIS software, using Canadian examples and data to illustrate key concepts. This material is designed for a two-day short-course format.

0.3 Structure

The course is divided into three parts. The first is a textual introduction to GIS and QGIS, the second is a set of tutorials that will walk you through the creation of several common types of maps. Finally, there is a quick reference section that provides short tutorials for common tasks (e.g., adding a vector layer).

0.4 Conventions

Throughout this course we will use bold text to refer to terms that are in the glossary (like GIS or vector layer), italic text to refer to QGIS menu options or window titles (such as the Style tab or Layers Panel), “quotations” to refer to layer names (such as “buildings_poly”), and preformatted text to refer to filenames (such as 02 Map of Canada/Canada-WGS84.shp).

0.5 Acknowledgments

This course would not have been possible without the Department of Earth & Environmental Science at Acadia University, which has run the course at least once per year since 2014. In particular this course would not have been possible without Lynn Graves, Ian Spooner, Christa Pufhal, Jonathan Shute, Lita O’Halloran, and Karissa Reischke.

This course material was written using the bookdown package inside RStudio. Pages were generated using pandoc and gitbook. The source is available on github.