Hello!

I have a dataset with columns for some variables of interest as well as location info (columns for lat and long) in eastern North America. About 100k records to process, although many are from the same locations.

I think that distance from the coastline of the Great Lakes or the Atlantic could help explain some of my variables of interest. Is there an easy way to do a batch query on the distance of a point from a coastline?

It's OK if this is crude, for example maybe there's some way to download a shape file of a half mile buffer from the coast and then somehow query which lat longs are inside that buffer. Then another shape file that's between 0.5 to 1 mile from the coast. Then another further inland, etc. (Once about 10 miles from shore shouldn't matter much anymore.)

If you were advising someone who is a bit of a newb working on this, what would you say is a good way to go. I have a little experience with QGIS, Python, and R.