In early June I took another trip down to Albany to roll out an instance of GRID and run another QGIS training course for South Coast NRM Inc (SCNRM).

QGIS Training at SCNRM in Albany

GRID is an easy to use online GIS system developed for NRM groups, with five of the seven NRM’s in Western Australia now utilising it. In a nutshell, GRID vastly improves the efficiency of GIS management and reporting by providing an central point of truth for all project-related spatial data.  It has easy workflows to get data in, a great interface to manage and interrogate data online, and filters to get data out for further analysis if required. GRID also performs as an online spatial knowledgebase where staff can quickly view on-ground works that are accruing in their area of interest and the ability to interrogate reference data such as property boundaries, hydrology, vegetation and soils etc.

Increasingly when we roll out an instance of GRID we also combine it with some QGIS training that uses locally relevant environmental data to learn how to interrogate, process and map spatial information; for example see the blogs for SWCC NRM and Dieback training.

QGIS is the number one open source (and free) GIS package available and GRID and QGIS work well together to provide a complete enterprise GIS solution for a fraction of the cost of commercial server/ desktop packages.  GRID can form the backbone of the system, providing a lot of functionality for all staff to use quickly and easily, with QGIS providing the “higher end” tools for people wanting to do more custom mapping work.  On top of that, GRID can then be used to provide public facing webmaps, embedding them into your public website (we’ve even created a WordPress plugin for this).  We’ve done this in a few places and can discuss this with you in more detail if you are interested.

Due to the success of this previous training we have already stared to roll out QGIS training every two months on a commercial basis to make it more readily available to the broader community. For more information about GRID or QGIS training please call 08 9227 7309 or email training@archive.gaiaresources.com.au. Alternatively you can email me directly here or contact us via Twitter or our Facebook page.

James