FIELD SITE LOCATOR APPLICATION USING CROSS PLATFORM, OPEN SOURCE GIS

Finding a suitable location for research is an essential first step in any field geology project. These locations must often satisfy criteria for surface ownership, mineral rights, formation exposure, and access. Access, in turn, requires finding county roads or roads that cross only public land, and often imposes constraints on the maximum grade of these roads for equipment passage. Also, in many areas landowner permission is required and an ideal field site locator (FSL) application should contain the relevant contact information. The popular GIS application ArcMap is often used to answer these types of geospatial queries, but its high cost and lack of cross platform support can be major disadvantages. The cross platform, open source QGIS program is a viable alternative and this project uses it to build a graphical application for geologists with only basic GIS skills to readily locate optimal field research sites in the state of Wyoming with easy extendability to other locations. The application also stores and retrieves landowner contact information for sites that require permission to cross or work on private land. To enhance field portability, it stores all necessary data on the computer where it is run rather than following the common practice in GIS of using data from online sources. Also, it incorporates a choice of base maps among topographic, DEM, and optional aerial imagery. All the input and output data is made available to QGIS so that users can take advantage of its powerful tools for further analysis or making print maps. The FSL application is tested for three different research problems, incorporating mineral rights, surface geology, and terrain analysis with access and land ownership criteria.