Adding administrative units (GAUL) info in existing grid

While you could do this in QGis by downloading the GAUL rasters (or for instance the shapefiles available at GADM https://gadm.org/download_country.html ) using the spatial-join operation with the points in the CSV file, the simplest solution we have right now is to use a ready-made GEE script that fetches that information automatically from Google Earth Engine assets.

The script allows you to add data on country/province/district from the GAUL 2014, to also add data on Climate/Soil/Ecologic Zone (which can later be used by Collect Earth to generate the IPCC GHG Inventory activity-data), SRTM DEM derived elevation/slope/aspect and to even add data from other rasters that you might already have for the region (i.e. you have a previously made Land Cover map and you want to know what was the land cover classification at the location of a plot.

You need to have a GEE developer account to use this method : https://signup.earthengine.google.com

1. Upload the CSV file to GEE as an asset. Make sure that when you upload the file you set the name of the headers of the columns that contain your latitude and longitude. If you are using a CSV that jad been used in Collect Earth the columns will be called YCoordinate and XCoordinate.

1. Once the asset has been generated, copy the asset ID, should be something like : users/YOUR_USERNAME/ASSET_UPLOADED

2. Open this URL : https://code.earthengine.google.com/?scriptPath=users%2Fsanchezpaus%2Futils%3Agrid%2FaddDataToCsv_SUPPORT_FORUM

3. Paste the ID of the asset on the line 28 so it becomes :

   var plotsAsset = "users/YOUR_USERNAME/ASSET_UPLOADED";

4. Configure the data you want to add to the plots. You can even add data from Shapefiles that you have uploaded to GEE, see lines 9 to 16

5. Run the code. and then execute the task on the top-right frame "Tasks". This will generate a CSV that will be stored in your Google Drive, you can download it from there!

Hope this explanation was easy to understand!