QGIS

Introduction

QGIS is a free, open-source, and powerful geographic information system (GIS). We will be using QGIS for some light lifting in this course: mostly data visualization and layouts. Because QGIS is free and powerful, I would like you to know your way around it and be comfortable moving data from GEE to QGIS and vice versa.

Unlike GEE, QGIS is a desktop GIS, which means in most cases the program needs to be installed on a local computer. All of the workstations in the Geography Department computer lab have QGIS installed, so you can use any of these computers to complete course work that requires QGIS. It will be far more convenient for you to keep up with the study materials in this course, however, if you install QGIS on your laptop. It’s free and the software runs on both a Mac and Windows.

Please complete the steps below before our first lab meeting.

Install QGIS for first time

1. Go to QGIS home page.
2. Click ‘Download Now’.
3. Choose your Operating System. This will start the download, which may take some time to finish.
4. Double-click the downloaded installer and follow the directions.

If on a Mac, after installation is complete:

1. Navigate to application folder.
2. Right-click on QGIS app.
3. Select ‘Open’.
4. You will see a warning that you have downloaded the app from the internet and questioning whether you trust the source. Affirm.

After you have told your OS to trust the app, you can open the app through Spotlight in the future.

On updating your QGIS version

If you have installed QGIS recently (2022-2023), you should be fine.

We will be using GEE for most of the heavy lifting in this course and will largely use QGIS for some visualization and layout tasks. My QGIS demos will use 3.32.2-Lima (accessed 9.6.23), but it is ok if your version predates this a little.

If you want to update your version, I tend to first remove the existing version and then install the new version.