Resources from ESRI (ArcGIS)
ESRI (the software company that makes ArcGIS products) offers a number of online courses. Many of these courses are available for free to students and staff at Massey University through our organisational license agreement with ESRI. The best way to find a course is to search their course catalog. You will need an ESRI account to start the course. For this please contact Massey’s ESRI site administrator Matthew Irwin m.e.irwin@massey.ac.nz
Resources for QGIS
QGIS is a free and open source GIS software with a world-wide user community. Training material and information on support groups are available through their website. There are various websites that offer tutorials for learning QGIS. Two are QGIS Tutorials and Tips and GISGeograpy
Python Resources
There are a number of Python Libraries for working with spatial data, some of the most common are Arcpy (for ESRI ArcGIS), the geopandas library, and the GDAL/OGR library. Links to information about these libraries and more can be found at GISGeography.
Spatial Database Resources
Several widely used databases support geospatial data, including rich models for representing geometry information, together with tools for spatial querying, indexing and some forms of analysis. Commercial database examples include Oracle Spatial and a common open source option is PostGIS (which extends PostgreSQL). The popular MySQL database also supports spatial objects. A longer list of spatial database management systems can be found here.
Remote Sensing Resources
Google Earth Engine is free-to-use cloud computation platform to access and analyse large volume of remote sensing data. The data archives consist of multispectral imagery, including MODIS, Sentinel-2 and Landsat and ASTER) to solve Geological and Environmental issues. To interact with the data and perform analytics, Python or JavaScript programming skills are required. Great resources are available in the documentation. Useful links:
- Google Earth: https://earthengine.google.com/
- GEE documentation: https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/guides/getstarted
- ASTER: https://terra.nasa.gov/data/aster-data
- Landsat: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/
- MODIS: https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/
- Sentinel-2: https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-2
Web Mapping Resources
Web maps are a great way to make your geographic data analysis and visualisation available to the world. A number of tools to create web mapping applications exist, with the most popular open source options being Leaflet, OpenLayers and MapBox GL JS (all of which are javascript libraries). Graphical tools can be used to generate a simple web mapping applications without coding. For example, the QGIS2Web plug in for QGIS. Proprietary options include MapBox Studio and ESRI’s ArcGIS WebApp Builder.
The GIS&T Body of Knowledge is an excellent resource that explains basic principles of all things geospatial.
Check out these videos to find out more about Geospatial Science, GIS and Geoinformatics:
Massey Geoinformatics Collaboratory 