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First steps

I work mostly in Linux or Mac operating systems, and use bash (or equivalent) in the terminal for most of the data preparation steps.

Set up your environment​

I have written a text file with the bash commands required to set up computing environment variables, for example the exact location of the GIS data folder is stored in the variable $GISDATA, etc.

The file is called project-env.sh and is located in the env folder of the repository, I start my session by sourcing that file into the terminal from the repository folder:

cd $PATH_TO_REPOSITORY
source env/project-env.sh

Setting the path​

Next I create a folder for the dataset and navigate to that folder to do all the data preparation steps.

I use the mkdir command with argument -p to create the folder.

I follow some simple rules to organise my folders. I always start with $GISDATA folder, then I select a group name for the type of variable and in each group I have subfolder for global and regional data sets. I choose a short but meaningful folder name for each datasetm, for example:

mkdir -p $GISDATA/vegetation/regional/Peru-vegetacion
cd  $GISDATA/vegetation/regional/Peru-vegetacion