Step 3: Mapping and geo-processing

Let’s start off easy, and build a map of the raccoon sightings in Belgium:

Load all the data in QGIS: the video below shows how you can make a map of the vector data you collected:

If your scalebar shows weird (low) numbers: this is probably because the units are still in the units of the project (so degrees): if you click on the scalebar, on the right you’ll see a dropdown menu where you can change the desired units to e.g. km.

Next step in QGIS is to use the grids we made earlier and summarize the data per grid. Each of these things can be achieved through a different function in QGIS

How many raccoon sightings? –> Count points per polygon

Average topographic diversity? –>Zonal statistics

total river length per polygon grid cell? –>Sum of line length

The videos below show you how you can implement these different functions:

Count points per polygon

Average topographic diversity

Sum of line length

---

Note that this last video also demonstrates how to export the data as a csv. Note that for filenaming, it is a good idea to avoid points and spaces within the filename. This we do to make sure we can read the results of our processing in Rstudio, where we will do the final analysis