I'm working in QGIS with species distribution polygons and I want to know how many cells in a grid does the polygon overlap. I've tried creating random points within the polygon and then used vector<Analysis<points in polygon but I end up with gaps.
Can anyone help with this. I'm still learning GIS and I need to do this with over 1000 species.
You could use the Join Attributes by Location tool from the toolar (Vector > Data Management Tools > Join Attributes by Location) and select your polygon layer as the Target layer and your grid layer as the Join layer. Then choose to take a summary and select any of the options (doesn't matter which if you're only interested in the count which is default):
The attribute table of the results should contain a COUNT field which tells you how many times a polygon overlaps a grid cell.
