Authors
Twila Moon (NSIDC), Lynne Harden (CIRES), Matt Fisher (NSIDC), Trey Stafford (NSIDC)
Abstract
Discovering new connections across diverse data and exploring new data for the first time can be challenging if you don’t know where to look, how to evaluate the data, or the best methods for bringing those data together. QGreenland, an NSF EarthCube funded project, is designed to remove the barriers to exploration and teaching with Greenland-related geospatial data. QGreenland provides an all-in-one download package of interdisciplinary data about Greenland, which a user can explore by opening a single project package within QGIS, a free GIS platform. Accompanied by a complete User Guide and detailed data information, QGreenland supports many uses: research planning and cross-disciplinary data discovery, creation of production quality maps and figures, a rich environment for teaching GIS skills, a platform for integrating independent Greenland data, a tool for offline in-field data viewing and analysis, and more. Our team launched QGreenland v1.0 in February 2021, and we are actively developing teaching material to bring QGreenland into the classroom. Upcoming user workshops and further tutorial material will continue to make QGreenland easy-to-use for those who have never used GIS software. And those with advanced technical skills can leverage the open source code development of QGreenland (github.com/nsidc/qgreenland) to improve QGreenland or even create custom geospatial data environments. We are excited to raise awareness and use of this new Greenland GIS tool, and to learn more about how ongoing QGreenland development can continue to serve the science and education communities.