I am a strong proponent of open-source software (this site was built using WordPress), and one piece of software that I am particularly excited about is Quantum GIS. Quantum is available for PC, OSX, and Linux, and provides virtually all of the functionality of ESRI’s ArcMap – more, in fact, if you don’t also pay for important extensions to ArcMap.
In the interest of encouraging more people in the forestry community to use GIS, I will be preparing step-by-step tutorials for some basic, important tasks in GIS, geared toward professional foresters working in California (because that’s what I know). They will be written without assuming any experience with GIS, so I will be spending some time explaining fundamental concepts in spatial data as they come up. Obviously, if you have experience with GIS, you will be able to skip some of the details, and just use the tutorials to learn how to work with this particular software.
Quantum is supported with fairly extensive online help, available at http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/index.html, which includes a general introduction to GIS. I find it easier to learn by doing real work, rather than ‘made-up’ exercises, and I also suspect many working professionals will appreciate being able to learn specific tasks applicable to their work.
These tutorials were prepared using QGIS version 2.0.1 – Dufour, running on a PC. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have a Mac available to install software on, and so I can only assume that the standard replacement of ctrl+click for right-clicking works in all cases.
Tutorial #1: Screen Digitizing from a Paper map or Digital Image
Tutorial #2: Using Buffers to Determine Properties to Notify (NOI)