GIS for Geotechs

A typical housekeeping task in my workplace is finding historic drillholes that have been entered into a database in an approximate manner, all with the same coordinates (and not their correct position)!. This may have happened for several valid reasons including when the location of the holes in an old investigation was not provided, other than on a basic plan, and those entering the data did not have time to determine accurate coordinates. The other situation is when a drill hole has been entered multiple times into a database by mistake and possibly given a different name that makes it difficult to easily identify by a standard attribute search. So is it possible to find point features (such as drill holes or sample locations) that have been given coincident coordinates in order to fix them? While there may be several ways of doing this, the answer is surprisingly simple through the use of virtual layers in QGIS! Virtual layers allows the power of SQL database functionality...

Welcome to my first ever blog. The main point of this post is to raise awareness of a course I have developed aimed at geotechnical practitioners operating in Australia and New Zealand and to introduce myself. I have run these in conjunction with the Australian Geomechanics Society and New Zealand Geotechnical Society. The course encourages geotechnical engineers and engineering geologists to develop their skills in the use of GIS as a regular tool in their work. I have used the popular QGIS programme to do this and developed a series of exercises using real geotechnical data to illustrate a variety of GIS tasks. If you are at all interested in participating in a course please drop me a line and detail any special requests. Some of my previous students actually had a reasonable amount of prior GIS experience but were motivated to attend to improve their skills or as a way of migrating to QGIS from other GIS software. I am continually adapting the course based on feedback receiv...