Creating artificial coordinate system to plot garden experiment? [closed]

Question

I am trying to map plant death in a garden experiment. The location of the garden doesn't matter, I just care about each plant in relation to the others. They were all planted on a grid system. My data looks like this:

Column Row Plant State
1      1   3333  Alive
1      2   3334  Alive
1      3   3335  Dead
2      1   3336  Dead
2      2   3337  Alive
2      3   3338  Alive
3      1   3339  Alive
3      2   3340  Alive
3      3   3341  Dead

I want each plant to be a point on the grid with the column functioning as the X and the row as the Y coordinates. I'll then use symbology to change the point colors to reflect the state of the plant.

My questions:

1. Is this at all reasonable/feasible to do with GIS?
2. If it is, how do I create an artificial coordinate system that would work for my purposes?
3. If not, what program would you recommend (that would ideally take an .xlxs or .xls file)?

I can use either ArcGIS or QGIS so please give recommendations for which would be easier.

Answer 1

It is feasible, don't worry about coordinate systems though. It can be in no coordinate system or it can be in any coordinate system. You could use your local coordinate system and plop the grid on top of your house or in the back yard.

You can do this with a simple 3x3 grid of polygons and create a field to record the status of each plant. Then symbolize based on the field.

There's probably even some simple excel based solution you can work up that colors cells based on cell value.

Answer 2

You don't have to create your own coordinate system: depending on where you live you can use a State Plane (feet) or UTM (metres) coordinate system that exists in your location.

From there, either in ArcGIS or QGIS you can create a fishnet grid of 3 cells by 3 cells and create them at whatever real world size is appropriate for your mock-up plots - maybe 5'x5' (or equivalent in m). You can also, as suggested, create this fishnet in your own backyard or in a real-world place - but you probably don't want to pick a random spot on the Earth...

From there you can start to assign the attributes and row/col coordinates you've outlined above, and begin to do some analysis. And because you've used a coordinate system in F or m, you can do some area analysis if you want as well...