Georeferencing Guide

Georeferencing is aligning data, usually an image or map, to its real-world coordinates (lat/long, UTM, etc.). When I recently looked online for a good practical guide, what I found were almost exclusively software tutorials for georeferencing or advanced professional guides, dozens of pages longs, that frankly are far beyond the needs of most of us scientists and full of jargon as well.

What I really wanted, to help out a lab mate, was a practical guide that was more-or-less software agnostic but strongly informed by experience. I was unable to find such a guide, so I made one myself. Where software details are salient, I try to include sufficient instructions for ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro, and QGIS, but in general, the focus is on guiding principles and standard practices rather than the software.

If you find the guide helpful or think of something I should add, be sure to comment below!