Over the years, Gaia Resources has undertaken a wide range of training courses; including those specific to applications and systems that we have developed for our clients, ranging from our mobile tools right through to web based systems.  However, we’ve also been increasingly providing training in software that we use ourselves, like PATN, and now with QGIS, the leading open source (and free!) GIS package.

Environmental QGIS Training (Basic)

In 2015 we announced our new commercial Environmental QGIS Training course via our blog, as a result of running training courses in QGIS since June 2014 (such as this one James blogged about for the South West Catchment Council, or this one with South Coast NRM).  You can read all our training blogs by clicking on this link.

We also run our training courses customised for our clients at a significant discount on the commercial courses we offer (details below) so if you are interested in running your own course, please get in touch via our training email address, training@archive.gaiaresources.com.au.

What does the training entail?

Our two day beginners course would benefit people from a range of different environmental backgrounds – there are not many activities these days that do not rely on some form of spatial interaction and given that it is free these skills can travel with you between jobs and industries. People that work with the environment in particular should hone their skills in GIS, not just to create maps for reporting purposes but to aid in the interpretation of the natural phenomena that is being observed.

As such the course has been designed with the environmental scientist/officer in mind by using an example environmental survey as a recurring theme throughout the training which is enhanced by using locally sourced data from the south west of Western Australia.

The course covers basic areas of GIS focusing on the environmental use case.  In terms of prerequisites, a good level of computer literacy is all we ask of people coming to the course, and that you bring a laptop along so we can get you set up on your own system, ready to run.

The components of the course include:

• Introduction to GIS,
• Introduction to coordinate reference systems,
• Familiarising yourself with QGIS,
• Data formats, structure and review,
• Data theming,
• Importing data and amending attributes,
• Using expressions/ field calculator,
• Creating, modifying and joining data,
• Cleaning data,
• Geoprocessing and other handy tools,
• Useful sources of spatial information/web map service connections, and
• Making maps!

In addition, we aim to finish the course around lunchtime on the second day, so we ask our trainees to bring along their own data and we can help you with specific problems in the second afternoon.  This really helps to embed the course material in some additional relevant examples for the trainees. We also provide tea, coffee, lunches and the course notes!

The commercial cost for the two-day course is currently $900 (ex GST) per person, however, members of bona fide environmental groups and students can access reduced rates @ndash; contact us at training@archive.gaiaresources.com.au to discuss.

Where have we run the course, and who does it suit?

The interactive map below (powered by our GRID product) shows all the locations of where we’ve run training (purple circles) and also who’s attended the courses (blue stars).   People who have attended our courses are from a range of organisations including Natural Resource Management groups, catchment and landcare groups, shires, herbariums, government departments, universities and various commercial providers in agricultural and conservation management, many of which come to the course with no prior GIS experience.

How do I sign up?

You can register your interest in the course by emailing training@archive.gaiaresources.com.au.  You can also send your queries to the same email address and we’ll be in touch to answer them.