Monday, 26 November 2018

Determining percent land coverage around points of interest using NLCD and QGIS


A former grad student was working on a project using ArcGIS to calculate land coverage (specifically water) around the breeding location of a threatened bird species. His zones went out 3, 10, 17, and 24km from each location. The reviewers have now asked for 1) zones up to 100km and 2) forest/grassland distinctions.


I have zero experience with GIS, and my former grad student is a new parent, trying to work, etc, so I’m sort of on my own. Can anyone give me the QGIS for dummies that will allow me to do this type of analysis? I have downloaded the NLCD and some shapefiles which apparently contain the coordinates for all locations. As a back up, I have all coordinates in excel as well. When I import his shapefile as a vector layer and try to add buffers, I’m only able to select degrees (not km) and the buffers are ovals instead of round. Ideally, I’d like to be able to extract the percent coverage for each category in NLCD for a few different radii.




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