Dear Amanda,

have you try to load on your hard disk a mosaic of your satellite image, or more, precisely by zone of the orthophotos which could concern your areas of prospections.

Once loaded on your tablet, you can note with an independent GPS coordinates of your points in X, Y and Z to implement it in the office.

For tracking you can use a 3-4 G smartphone with Google or Openstreet map and mark / save on your tablet points from Google Earth after GPS hiking check for example. Be careful between the Google DEM and the GPS data of randdonnée, the level of precision will not be the same, it is up to you to define the resolution and the desired precision.

Hoping that it will be useful to you,

Cordially

Hi Amanda,

Are you adamant of using QGIS? Your solution might be simpler as Google Earth allows the caching of certain areas for offline usage. You can make GPS points on the maps which can be written down and saved on the software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic1cyOW2-2s

Cheers,

Maarten

The Google Earth have the DEM resolution of the Google DEM, and other problems : :

Have a look please to this post : https://community.esri.com/thread/212740-google-earth-elevations-vs-srtm

It depend which accurancy Amanda need.

Yes, it might not be the best for detailed geospatial analysis, but in this case they only need it to identify the GPS coordinates of large mammals so elevation is not that important? The benefit of using Google earth is also that it has a high resolution so they can identify spatial features such as trees that make it easier to pinpoint the exact location of the animals without needing to be very close to them.

It' right, but the ecological area of mammals, might be various in Africa against pressures.

In particular for satellite imagery; most of the high resolution imagery in Google Earth Maps is the DigitalGLobe Quickbird which is roughly 65cm pan-sharpened. (65 cm panchromatic at nadir, 2.62 m multispectral at nadir) You can find out all the details here.

But using Google imagery in research , you must be caution for the publication and the mention to

Hi Amanda,

If you really want to use QGIS, there is a plugin to capture coordinates: https://docs.qgis.org/3.4/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/core_plugins/plugins_coordinate_capture.html

You can copy the coordinates and paste them in a notepad, without having to write them down on paper.

Or an easier way: at the bottom of the QGIS windows, the status bar displays the current position of the mouse. https://docs.qgis.org/3.4/en/docs/user_manual/introduction/qgis_gui.html#status-bar

For both solutions, just make sure that the coordinate reference system (CRS) is WGS84 (EPSG 4326). That will give you longitude and latitude of a point in degrees.

As Maarten said, you need a high resolution image as a basemap to help you track the position of mammal groups. So Google Earth might be a better solution to check.

PS: There's a misunderstanding about the term GPS that makes you think you need a signal (either from GPS satellites or from a cell operator). But what you really want here is just the coordinates of any point in the map: nothing related to the GPS or a GNSS system, except that you want the coordinates displayed in the same CRS as the GPS system. Any GIS (like any paper map) can give you the coordinates of any point in the map, you just need to choose the right CRS so it displays them in the desired coordinate system.