Unknown Geospatial Project - Dev Diary

I'm a bit of a generalist. I like lots of different things and I believe that I can deliver the most value to the world by bringing these things together. The fact that I feel the need to 'bring value to the world' also speaks about my insecurities. Anyway, I digress.

I like nature. I like tech. Or at least, I'm good at tech. I find it genuinely hard to answer the question on whether I like it or not because I spend 40 hours a week doing it, regardless of whether I want to or not, plus extra for things like this. It is perhaps more accurate to say I spend a lot of time with tech. I like tech in at least a stockholm syndrome sort of way. ANYWAY.

I like nature and I like tech. Something I've noticed that crops up reasonably often when conservation/nature and tech combine is GIS, geospatial engineering. I know very little about what that is or what doing it entails, further than "it's something to do with maps".

This is my attempt to learn it, and to output something that could actually be useful to someone, or at the least simply interesting to me.

I will start by going through as much of a tutorial as I can be arsed to do, then I will switch to working on my own project. Without knowing exactly what it is and what can be done with GIS, it is hard to clearly define a project outcome, so this is extremely subject to change and/or abandonment but...

I want to build something that maps something natural in my local area, likely trees or birds. I have no idea what it can map further than that, nor if there is any data that can be mapped available on the internet oat large, or if this is something that I'm going to have to collect myself.

ChatGPT suggests tracking change over time to green spaces, or changes in bird population, but chatGPT suggests a lot of things that I wouldn't recommend so I'll reserve judgement on that until I know a bit more about GIS.

10/05/2025

Aim: undefined

There was no particular aim to this session other than a vague feeling of guilt that I should start doing this since I identified that I wanted to do a project around it weeks ago. I downloaded QGIS (which turned out to take a long time) and some demo data for a course I've found - https://courses.spatialthoughts.com/introduction-to-qgis.html - and left it there.

It was a Saturday night, to be fair to me.