The power of GIS lies in analysing multiple data sources together. Often the answer you are seeking lies in many different layers and you need to do some analysis to extract and compile this information. One such type of analysis is Points-in-Polygon. When you have a polygon layer and a point layer - and want to know how many or which of the points fall within the bounds of each polygon, you can use this method of analysis.
Given the locations of all known significant earthquakes, we will try to find out which country has had the highest number of earthquakes.
We will use NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center’s Significant Earthquake Database as our layer represenging all major earthquakes. Download the tab-delimited earthquake data.
Natural Earth has Admin 0 - Countries dataset. Download the countries
For convenience, you may directly download a copy of both the datasets from the links below:
Note
You may see some error messages as QGIS tries to import the file. These are valid errors and some rows from the file will not be imported. You can ignore the errors for the purpose of this tutorial.
Note
Be patient after clicking OK, QGIS may take upto 10 minutes to calculate the results.
We determined from the simple analysis of 2 datasets that China has had the highest number of major earthquakes. You may refine this analysis further by taking into consideration the population as well as the size of the country and determine which is the most adversely affected country by major earthquakes.