About The Course

With a huge demand for professional ecologists and conservation practitioners with applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) skills, this course provides core knowledge of GIS to support conservation action and evaluate its biodiversity outcomes.

For practitioners in the conservation sector looking to develop skills in GIS-informed decision making and those seeking to change careers, this unique course has been designed to provide both core operational skills and experience of how GIS can be applied to longer conservation processes. The explicit aim is to allow students to integrate both basic and advanced GIS skills into their everyday conservation tasks and activities, principally using the QGIS open-source system.

This 1 year course is delivered by lecturers with extensive industry experience in using GIS across different parts of the conservation sector, both in the UK and internationally. Students will learn to access and use a range of data types including those from habitat surveys, species monitoring, UAVs and satellites. 

Modules

• Fundamentals of Conservation GIS: Gain a solid foundation in practical and theoretical knowledge for operating a GIS system. This includes how to create, map, edit, digitise, manipulate, present and interrogate conservation-related spatial data.
• Acquisition & Management of Spatial Data: Access, manipulate and map, data from satellite images and Lidar data to point and grid data in species and habitat surveys
• GIS for Conservation Action: Hands on experience in real world scenarios of developing, supporting and evaluating practical conservation actions at different spatial scales
• Advanced Spatial Analysis: Analyse data to generate habitat suitability models and evaluate how landscape affects species distribution