10-30 minutes, or more if your data need a lot of cleaning!
Today’s GIS exercises are all about add your fieldwork data to the map. These data are the information you have collected at each location of your field surveys. On this page we cover how to ensure that your data are formatted correctly for use in a GIS project, and on the next page we import them into QGIS
Before importing your field observations into QGIS, you need to ensure they are clean and consistent. A good way to check for problems is to open your data in Excel and use the Filter or Pivot Table tools to examine them
If you’re working with the water beetle dataset, you can download it from the Resources section of the course above
With all new and unfamiliar datasets, we always recommend that you look at the data to familiarise yourself with it before doing anything further, such as adding it to your GIS project or analysing it
Open the .csv file in your usual spreadsheet software (e.g. Excel) and view the column headers. Do they make sense to you? Do you understand what data each column contains?