QGIS tips

Imagine spending 30 years legally responsible for a habitat boundary that was drawn on the wrong piece of land. And I don't mean wrong by a field or two. We're talking wrong because the data underlying the map was never accurate to begin with. It's things like this that make me sit bolt upright at 3 am, sweating like plums wrapped in a polythene bag.

One of the biggest misconceptions in ecology I come across is the notion that finding reliable GIS data is hard. If that’s what you think, you might want to look away now: I disagree. What is hard, however, is knowing whether the data you've found is actually any good.

I delivered a seminar at Ecology Expo 2026 for freelancers & small businesses in ecology who may not have in-house GIS skills or access to geospatial specialists.

Open-source technology is quietly running the world. It's part of the critical infrastructure and hardware that are vital to many of our jobs and most people don’t realise it. Many of my clients use QGIS (mostly as I train people how to use it) and they’re drawn to it because it’s “free” ー not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s accessible and lets you road-test it for nothing before you embed it in your work, so why wouldn’t you?

If you want to see the count (total number) of features you have in a layer you don't have to open your attribute table to see the amount you can do it within your layers panel!