How to Make a Study Area Map Online in Five Minutes

Reference
Study Area Map MakerThe tool this walkthrough uses, from a CSV of coordinates to an exported figure in about five minutes.Open the Study Area Map Maker

Most people making a study area map for the first time open QGIS, spend an afternoon on it, and produce something that works. That is a reasonable use of an afternoon if you are going to make maps repeatedly. If you need one figure for one paper, it is not.

This walks through the browser route from a blank page to an exported figure. It takes about five minutes, and nothing is installed or uploaded.

A five step strip. Step one shows template layout icons with one selected. Step two shows a country outline with a region highlighted. Step three shows the same region with site markers added. Step four shows colour swatches and sliders. Step five shows a page with PNG, SVG and PDF buttons. Below is a panel headed the one thing people get wrong, explaining that the first panel should be the widest and that everything runs in the browser.
The five steps. The panel underneath is the mistake that costs people the most time, and it is a layout mistake rather than a technical one.

Before you start, get your coordinates in order

You need decimal degrees. Latitude between minus 90 and 90, longitude between minus 180 and 180, and a minus sign on anything west of Greenwich or south of the equator. If your coordinates are in UTM or in degrees, minutes and seconds, convert them first with the coordinate converter.

A CSV with a header row is ideal. Column names are matched loosely, so name, label, site, station and well all work for the label, and lat, latitude and y all work for latitude. A group column lets the tool colour sites by type and build the legend for you.

Step one, pick a template

Open the study area map maker and choose a layout along the top. One panel if your study area is the whole country or the region is well known. Two panels if you need a locator. Three in a cascade for the classic thesis figure that walks from world to country to study area.

You can change this at any point without losing your settings, so start with two and see how it looks.

Step two, choose the area

Each panel is set separately, so click Panel a, Panel b and so on to switch between them. Set the extent for each: whole world, continent, country, state or province, district, fit to my points, or a custom box you type in.

This is where people go wrong. The first panel is the locator, so it should be the widest. The dashed box drawn on a panel is always the extent of the panel that follows it, which means the box disappears entirely if you put the widest map last.

Drag on any panel to shift it and scroll on it to zoom. Both act on whichever panel you are pointing at.

Step three, add your sites

Three ways in. Type a latitude and longitude and press Add point. Paste your CSV rows into the box and press Read the text above. Or upload the file. There is also a fourth: double click anywhere on a panel and it drops a point at that coordinate, which is quicker than looking up a location you can see.

Check the first point before you plot fifty. A site that lands in the ocean off west Africa means the latitude and longitude columns are swapped, because zero and zero is in the Gulf of Guinea. A Canadian site that lands in Kazakhstan means the minus sign on the longitude went missing.

Step four, set the furniture

Scale bar, north arrow, coordinate grid and legend are all per panel. The defaults are sensible: bar and arrow on, grid off, legend on the last panel. Turn the grid on for the detail panel if anybody might want to read coordinates off the figure, which in a thesis they might.

If the journal prints in black and white, open the colours section and apply the black and white preset now rather than at the end. It changes which fills read as distinct, and it is easier to design in than to convert to.

Step five, export

Set the canvas size before exporting, not after. A double column journal figure at 300 dots per inch is about 2244 pixels wide, so set the canvas to that and export at one times. Scaling a small export up afterwards adds pixels but no detail.

Then pick a format. SVG if the journal takes vector art, and the text stays as text so a copy editor can restyle it. PNG at up to four times canvas size if they want raster at a stated resolution. PDF for a supervisor, a report or a slide.

What five minutes does not get you

It does not get you your own shapefiles on the map, a specific projected coordinate system, choropleth shading driven by a data table, or a satellite basemap. Those are all reasons to open a real GIS, and the QGIS comparison lays out where the line falls.

What it does get you is a figure that satisfies every item on the reviewer checklist except the caption, which nobody can write for you.

Related Calculators and Reference