BITC / NBD protocol - 1

Hello. Today, I will take you through the steps of developing a grid-based aggregation of biodiversity data with the idea of doing summaries of completeness, and summaries of sampling gaps with respect to geographic and environmental factors. There is a protocol which is provided with these movies. I'm basically going to assume a bunch of things. I will assume that you have cleaned your data. I will also assume that you have your point data in QGIS as a shapefile. You can follow along with the protocol This is the beginning of it. We will start in this step of vector grid. We want to select our aggregation level. Here in QGIS, I have my country outline. We'll be using the country of Ghana as an example. Go to 'Research Tools' --> 'Vector Grid' Select the country shapefile. Update the extents from the layer. Choose the level of aggregation. I'm going to use 1/2 degree. And, choose this option of "Output grid as polygon". Finally, name the output as a shapefile. And, I'm going to put this in a temporary folder. As you can see, we very quickly have a 1/2 degree grid. The grid is based on the outline and extent of Ghana. We can edit this. You need to have the 'Select' tool. We can edit this to remove grid squares that have nothing to do with Ghana. And, we're basically done with this first step. We can stop editing. Save it. We now have our aggregation grid. That's the end of this first film.