31: Self-directed tasks [A1-grades]#
You now have enough data on your map to address your objectives and help answer your research question. Along the way, you’ve covered all the basics of working with data in GIS, and a bit more - you’ve added vector point data, vector line data, vector polygon data, attribute data, raster data with and without pre-existing coordinate information, vectorised raster features, and digitised georeferenced features; you’ve done geoprocessing on both vector and raster data, including clipping, dissolving, buffering, selecting by attribute value, and using the raster calculator - even machine learning, and working out exceedance probabilities and return rates to support that geoprocessing; and you’ve visualised data in multiple different ways: simple, categorised, and graduated vector symbology; and single-band, multi-band, paletted/unique values, and hillshade raster symbology.
Hopefully this has given you a good insight into what’s possible to do with GIS - in terms of adding data, processing the data, and visualising the data. Hopefully it has also demonstrated to you that you can do it. Yes, the instructions you’ve followed talked you through these tasks, but hopefully you feel like you wouldn’t only be able to do this kind of mapping with these instructions.
That is something I’d like you to demonstrate now. You’ve seen some of what’s possible - so, show me you can do something without instructions to talk you through it.
Importing / Processing / Visualising the Data#
What you do here is up to you. Perhaps you think there’s other data which would be useful to show on the map; or perhaps there’s something else you’d like to do with the data you already have. You’ve seen all the processing we’ve done; that means you’ve also seen how many tools in the menus and the geoprocessing toolbox we haven’t used. You’ve added plugins - so you’ve also seen how many plugins you haven’t added. Of course, you don’t need to try and figure it out all by yourself - you can be sure that for every tool or plugin, there’s people who have written up descriptions of how to use it, and other people who have posted and answered questions online about using it. There’s plenty of resources out there - so, show me you can go a bit beyond the set tasks, and do something independently.
This is your final task involving adding, processing, or visualising data - when you’re done, congratulations: you’re ready to move on to creating print layouts to produce your final maps.