Field notes on rocks, maps, and the ground under Tucson, Arizona
If maps, layers, and shapefiles sound like a foreign language right now, that's completely normal — everyone starts there. I put together a plain-English roadmap for people who have never opened GIS software before.
Read the Beginner's Roadmap »Every few months someone new to the field asks me the same question: where do I even begin with GIS? The honest answer is that you don't need pricey software or a geography degree to get going.
This post walks through the free tool I recommend to every beginner, the handful of core ideas worth learning first, and where to find real data to practice on so it stops feeling abstract.
A static map tells you where something is. An interactive one lets someone ask their own questions of it — click a point, get a popup, zoom into the part they actually care about.
Once you're comfortable with the basics from the first post, this is a natural next project. Here's the whole process, from picking a platform to publishing something you can actually share with people.
Tucson sits in a strange and wonderful spot geologically speaking. Between the Catalinas to the north and the old mining districts scattered south and east, you get a little bit of everything.
No experience, no software, no idea where to begin? This is the page I send everyone who asks.
GIS looks intimidating from the outside — the acronyms alone can be enough to make someone close the tab. But underneath the jargon it's a fairly simple idea: take information that has a location attached to it, put it on a map, and look for patterns. Everything else is detail. Here's the order I'd tackle it in if I were starting over.
Before opening any software, it helps to know the handful of ideas that everything else builds on:
You don't need to memorize any of this. Just recognizing the words when you see them again will save you a lot of confusion.
Skip the expensive software for now. QGIS is free, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is what a large share of working GIS professionals actually use day to day. Download it from qgis.org and you're set — no account, no trial period, no catch.
You need something to click around in. A few reliable free sources:
Pick something small and dull to start — city boundaries or a set of trails works fine. The goal isn't an impressive dataset, it's just something to load, break, and fix again.
Open QGIS, drag your data in, and start clicking things. Turn layers on and off. Change the colors. Open the attribute table and scroll through it. Zoom in until it stops making sense, then zoom back out. This is the step where GIS stops being abstract — you start to feel how layers stack on top of each other.
You don't need to know everything QGIS can do. These cover most beginner and intermediate work:
This is the step people skip, and it's the one that matters most. Map the trails near your house. Chart flood-prone areas in your neighborhood. Visualize elevation change on a hike you've done. When the subject interests you, the tools stop feeling like homework.
Open QGIS's layout manager, add a title, a legend, a scale bar, and a north arrow, and export it as a PNG or PDF. This last step matters more than it seems — it forces you to think about communicating your data, not just manipulating it.
Once these steps feel familiar, the next two posts are good places to go deeper: Getting Started in GIS Mapping and Building Your First Interactive Map.
Every few months someone new to the field asks me the same question: where do I even begin with GIS? The honest answer is that you don't need pricey software, a geography degree, or years of training. You need a clear path and something small to practice on. That's what this post is.
Strip away the acronym and GIS is just this: you take information that has a location — roads, rivers, elevation, soil type, population, whatever — and you layer it on a map so you can see how those things relate to each other. Once you frame it that way, it's a lot less mysterious.
Before you touch any software, it's worth getting comfortable with a few concepts that show up constantly:
Understanding these four ideas ahead of time makes everything downstream easier to follow.
For beginners, QGIS is the obvious starting point. It's free, it's powerful enough for professional work, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux without a paywall anywhere. You can grab it at qgis.org without creating an account. Browser-based options like ArcGIS Online or Google Earth Engine exist too, but QGIS gives you a much more honest feel for how the pieces underneath a map actually fit together.
You'll learn nothing without real data to click around in. Fortunately there's a lot of it available for free:
Start small and boring — city boundaries, a river network, a handful of trails. The goal is just to have something to work with, not to impress anyone.
Once you have data, open QGIS and add it — vector layers like shapefiles or GeoJSON, raster layers like TIFFs. Turn layers on and off. Change the symbology and see what happens. Open the attribute table. Zoom, pan, measure a distance. This is the point where GIS stops feeling abstract and starts feeling like something you can actually touch.
You don't need to master every button in QGIS. Focus on the handful of operations that appear in almost every workflow:
Get comfortable with these and you can handle the large majority of beginner and intermediate GIS work.
The fastest way to learn is to choose a small project with a clear goal that genuinely interests you — map the rivers and elevation near your town, look at potential flood zones, sketch a trail map with contour lines, or chart population density somewhere you know well. It doesn't need to be impressive. When you're working on something you care about, the tools stick without feeling like memorization.
After processing your data, put together a finished product. Open the layout manager in QGIS, add a map frame, a legend, a title, a scale bar, and a north arrow, adjust the fonts and colors, and export it as a PNG or PDF. This step is where you practice communicating your data, not just manipulating it.
GIS is a deep field and nobody picks it up overnight. Feeling a little lost at the start is completely normal. Try a new tool every week or so, redo maps you find online, and keep a folder of practice datasets around. The more you experiment, the faster the software stops feeling foreign. Anyone can learn this — it just takes starting, and building one small thing at a time.
Creating your first interactive map sounds intimidating, but it's much easier than it looks, and you don't need to be a professional developer to get there. An interactive map lets people explore data on their own terms — clicking a feature for more detail, zooming into the part they care about, hovering to highlight something. That's a genuinely different experience than handing someone a flat image.
At its core, an interactive map is just a base map combined with data layers that respond to what the user does. Click a city and see its population. Hover over a trail and it lights up. Understanding that combination — base map plus responsive data — guides almost every decision you'll make from here, including which tool to use.
You've got a few solid options depending on how hands-on you want to be:
For a first project, ArcGIS Online or Mapbox Studio are the easier starting points — both give you templates and visual editors so you can focus on the data and the design instead of wrestling with code.
Good data is what makes an interactive map worth exploring. Use your own if you have it, or pull from free sources — OpenStreetMap for detailed geographic features, or a government open data portal for boundaries, roads, or points of interest. Start with something manageable: landmarks around your city, or a set of hiking trails. Small datasets load faster and are easier to keep straight while you're still learning.
Before it goes on the map, make sure it's actually usable. If you're mapping restaurants, for instance, each entry needs a name, an address, and a category so a click on the point tells the user something useful. It's also worth checking your data's projection at this stage — most web maps use Web Mercator, so anything in a different projection may need to be reprojected to line up correctly.
Most beginner-friendly platforms let you upload a dataset and automatically turn it into points, lines, or polygons. From there, decide how the map should respond to clicks and hovers — a popup with details, a highlighted polygon, color coding by category. This is worth experimenting with; the way your map behaves matters just as much as the data behind it.
Think about visual hierarchy. If you're mapping parks and roads, make sure the colors actually contrast so nothing gets lost. Keep line thickness, point size, and labels legible without cluttering the view. Add a legend, a scale bar, and attribution where relevant — small details that make a map look finished rather than thrown together. And remember people will view this on all kinds of screens, so keep it responsive.
Click every point. Zoom in and out. Interact with each layer the way a first-time visitor would. Check that popups show the right information and nothing is misaligned. This step catches small errors that would otherwise undercut how trustworthy the map feels — and often reveals a feature or two worth simplifying, like adding basic search if there's a lot to sift through.
Most platforms make this simple — share a link, embed it in a page, or export it for use elsewhere. Once it's live, you can gather feedback and keep improving it. One of the nice things about interactive maps is that they don't need to be perfect on day one; they're easy to iterate on once real people start clicking around.
Understanding the goal, choosing a platform that fits your comfort level, preparing solid data, styling thoughtfully, and testing before you publish — that's the whole process. It turns a flat dataset into something people can actually explore, and it's a great next step once the basics from the first post feel comfortable.
Full Name: Joel Bennett
Title: Senior Geologist, Geolintix Consulting
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Born and raised right here in Tucson, Arizona, I've had a thing for rocks for about as long as I can remember. My name is Joel Bennett, and I'm a Senior Geologist who's happiest out in the field — though I spend a fair amount of time these days mentoring folks who are just getting started, which is really the whole reason this blog exists.
I've spent 30+ years doing exploration, mapping, and geotechnical work across southern Arizona, and somewhere along the way I picked up GIS and remote sensing too, since the two fields go hand in hand more often than not. I value clear communication and I'd rather explain something twice than leave someone guessing.
This site is where I keep the guides and field notes I end up writing for people anyway — new hires, students, or anyone who emails me asking where to start. If you're one of those people, welcome. Start with the roadmap.