Today I completed a course on Udemy, Applied GIS in 2022 – Project-based Spatial Analysis in QGIS.

It seems to be a good toe tip into the GIS pool. The primary purpose of the tutorial is to familiarize us with purposes, elements and definitions of GIS. And to introduce us to QGIS, the open source Geographic Information System.

Some of the items we covered are vector files (.shp), raster files, spatial data, attribute tables, filtering, union, intersection, joins, buffers and satellite images. This was by no means an all encompassing course, but it had a lot of useful information, and has got me excited to learn more.

My initial curiosity in GIS was sparked when I saw some shows where they used LiDAR to find lost civilizations! I find it incredible that much of the surface can be essentially “stripped away” and reveal what is underneath. GIS is not LiDAR, but it is a good place to start…

Next steps- get some more knowledge under my belt, then figure out a decent project to create.