An introduction to GIS and QGIS 3

In this short video we'll just go over some of the standard terminology for GIS programs and make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to basic computer usage. This is a beginner course and for some students this can be really important. If you think you're okay with all this then you might be able to skip this video (shhhhh! don't tell anyone I said that :-) )

A quick quiz to keep you on your toes

This section explains how to download and unzip the data for use in the GIS and QGIS practical sessions.

Here we'll look at some basic GIS concepts. The differences between rasters and vectors, properties and values, and the ways we can use GIS for analysis.

Let's have a quick quiz on some fundamental GIS concepts

Here we'll just check that our practical data is working.

Here we'll take a closer look at QGIS and explore some of the potential and how to get help.

What do you know about QGIS?

Here we look at the QGIS interface, layers and zooming.

Symbology in GIS and QGIS is vital to allow users to understand  what our map is showing. We'll also look at how to view some attribute data using map tips.

See if you can use map tips to find the name of a lake.

GIS and QGIS provide powerful ways to query data. Here we'll use some SQL to select by attributes.

Putting into practice what you've learned about writing queries try and answer the following questions.

These can be quite difficult but the answers are revealed in the next video if you get stuck.

Building on our previous SQL query we'll create a new query in QGIS to drill further down into the data. We'll also look at different ways to achieve the same goals through different selection methods.

Choropleth or thematic maps are a great way to convey information to the map user. Here we'll use classifications to show population by country in QGIS.

Using what you've learned about symbology and styling layers so far, see if you can figure out how to classify our countries layer by population DENSITY.

As a hint as well as using a column for a classification you can also use an Expression. What would be the formula for population density and do we have a field in the attribute table that could be useful?

If you get stuck the answer is at the start of the next lecture.

Getting more advanced in our classification now we'll look at population density.

Just a quickie as a reminder on data types.

So far we've looked at vector data. Here we explore raster data.

In this final section we'll explore how to use print composer to output our map to different formats. Sharing GIS data is often required and QGIS allows us to save maps as images, .pdfs and more through print layout.