Self-Led QGIS for Biodiversity Net Gain

Summary

Join this self-led course with weekly tutor support sessions to build on your existing QGIS skills, to enable you to use the software to carry out a BNG assessment.

Description

Conducting a BNG assessment is now mandatory for most new developments and is used to inform land management too. Conducting these assessments requires specialist technical skills, and can be carried out using the freely available, open-source mapping software, QGIS.

The event is suitable for delegates familiar with the QGIS interface who have been using the product for at least three months. Ideally, you will have attended an introductory QGIS course. The course will be delivered online using the CIEEM Moodle platform where you will have access to videos and exercises to work through each week. The course includes a 1 hour tutor support session once a week (via Zoom). This course should take you approximately 6 hours to complete, plus the tutor sessions.

The course builds on delegates QGIS skills, and equips them with the specific skills needed to carry out a BNG assessment. It covers creating forms, working with Geopackages, how to integrate baseline habitat data, that ecologists would collect via a field study, with proposed development data, provided, for instance, by a (landscape) architect. The course will cover working with CAD data in QGIS, which is very often needed in a BNG assessment. It will also enable delegates to confidently use NE's BNG QGIS Project, together with NE's Import to BNG Metric Excel tool.

Please note that the Tutor led sessions will be at 10:00am for 1 hour on the following dates: 10th Jan, 17th Jan, 24th Jan, 31st Jan. Although these are not essential, we do recommend that you attend these sessions. This will be your opportunity to ask questions and seek support for the self-led work. These sessions will not be recorded.

Who Should Attend?

Typical target audiences include: developers, industrial operators and land managers, local authority ecologists and planners, conservation officers and licensing staff within SNCOs or NGOs, students, graduates, ecological consultants, environmental managers, wardens, rangers.

Knowledge Level

Intermediate

Prior Knowledge

Good basic working knowledge of QGIS including the ability to carry out the following operations:
- Create projects from existing vector and raster data
- Symbolise layers
- Digitise points, lines and polygons
- Broad awareness of Biodiversity Net Gain and the NE BNG metric

Learning Outcomes

• Set up a QGIS form for ease of data input in the office or field.
• Integrate a range of datasets commonly used in BNG assessments.
• Geo-reference a raster field survey map for use in QGIS.
• Work with CAD data in QGIS (add, symbolise, re-position, covert to other formats).
• Create pre and proposed development habitat datasets using advanced digitising tools.
• Work with the NE BNG QGIS project, including exporting data to the BNG Metric using NE tools.

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