QGIS: a Tool for Collaboration & Research at Universities

Presenter: Dr. Michele Tobias

QGIS is often the best choice for academics invested in reproducible research, collaboration, and education. University of California Davis has an every-growing QGIS user base, due in part to the support and training we provide at the Library and DataLab, but also because it meets our researcher’s needs for open tools that work on a variety of computing platforms that their research partners off campus can also access. I will discuss the reasons open source in general, and QGIS in particular, is a valuable tool in research involving spatial data and discuss some examples of recent Library and DataLab projects that use QGIS, including the American Viticultural Areas (AVA) Digitizing Project. The goal of the AVA Project is to create a free and open spatial dataset of the US Government’s AVA boundaries suitable for use in academic research. Since the project began in 2017, the UC Davis team has been joined by UC Santa Barbara, Virginia Tech, and dozens of individual contributors to digitize almost 300 complex polygons representing these designated wine marketing regions and the dataset has been used in academic research and in the wine industry.