Mergin Maps: QGIS in pocket 2.5.0

Simplify your field surveys by capturing GPS field data on your mobile or tablet. Design customizable mobile forms to gather essential information and enable your survey teams to complete them on their smartphones or tablets. The collected data, along with precise location details, can be easily recorded offline and seamlessly synchronized with QGIS within moments.

Mergin Maps offers a practical solution to alleviate the burdens of transcribing paper field notes, manually georeferencing photos, and transcribing GPS coordinates. With Mergin Maps Input, an extension of the open-source GIS software QGIS, you can seamlessly access, analyze, and modify your QGIS projects directly on your mobile device. The layers in your map projects retain their appearance from QGIS desktop, and bidirectional data synchronization is facilitated via the Mergin Maps QGIS plugin.

Visualize the field survey data on maps and export it in various formats such as CSV, Microsoft Excel, ESRI Shapefile, Mapinfo, GeoPackage, PostGIS, AutoCAD DXF, KML, and more. Mergin Maps supports offline field data collection and provides flexibility to choose between offline or web-based background maps and contextual layers.

The Mergin Maps sync system boasts several advantages:

• No dependency on cables for data transfer
• Collaborative project sharing
• Secure simultaneous dataset editing, even without an internet connection
• Intelligent merging of updates from different surveyors
• Real-time data transmission from the field
• Version history tracking and cloud backup
• Precise access control management
• Synchronization with PostGIS datasets

The supported field types for forms include:

• Text (single or multi-line)
• Numeric (standard, with buttons or a slider)
• Date/Time (with a calendar picker)
• Photo upload functionality
• Checkbox (yes/no options)
• Dropdown selection from predefined values
• Dropdown linked to values from another table

Forms can be tailored to enforce data validation through custom rules. Additionally, the software seamlessly integrates with both internal GPS receivers in devices and third-party Bluetooth GPS receivers for enhanced accuracy during field data collection.