Aggregate Points

This tool works with a layer of point features and a layer of area features. It first figures out which points fall within each area. After determining this point-in-area spatial relationship, statistics about all points in the area are calculated and assigned to the area. The most basic statistic is the count of the number of points within the area, but you can get other statistics as well.

For example, suppose you have point features of coffee shop locations and area features of counties, and you want to summarize coffee sales by county. Assuming the coffee shops have a TOTAL_SALES attribute, you can get the sum of all TOTAL_SALES within each county, or the minimum or maximum TOTAL_SALES within each county, or the standard deviation of all sales within each county.

Calculate Density

The Calculate Density tool creates a density map from point or line features by spreading known quantities of some phenomenon (represented as attributes of the points or lines) across the map. The result is a layer of areas classified from least dense to most dense, for example:

• Calculating densities of hospitals within a county. The result layer will show areas with high and low accessibility to hospitals, and this information can be used to decide where new hospitals should be built.
• Identifying areas that are at high risk of forest fires based on historical locations of forest fires.
• Locating communities that are far from major highways in order to plan where new roads should be constructed.

Create Buffers

A buffer is an area that covers a given distance from a point, line, or area feature.

Buffers are typically used to create areas that can be further analyzed using a tool such as Overlay Layers. For example, if the question is what buildings are within one mile of the school, the answer can be found by creating a one-mile buffer around the school and overlaying the buffer with the layer containing building footprints. The end result is a layer of those buildings within one mile of the school.

Create Travel-Time Areas

Create Travel-Time Areas creates areas that can be reached within a specified drive, walk, or trucking time or distance. It measures out from one or many points (up to 1,000), along roads, to create a layer that can help you answer questions such as the following:

• Where can I go from here within a 30-minute drive?
• Where can I go from here within a 30-minute drive at 5:30 p.m. during rush hour?
• What areas of town can the fire department reach within five minutes?
• How would fire-response coverage improve by building a new fire station here?
• What market areas does my business cover?

You may be able to answer your questions solely through visualizing the output areas. Alternatively, you can perform further spatial analysis using the output areas. For instance, running Aggregate Points using drive-time areas with demographic data can help determine which potential store location would likely provide the best customer base for your type of business.

Derive New Locations

This tool derives new features in your study area that meet a series of criteria you specify. These criteria can be based on attribute queries (for example, parcels that are vacant) and spatial queries (for example, parcels that are within flood zones).

Dissolve Boundaries

Areas that overlap or share a common boundary are merged together to form a single area.

You can control which boundaries are merged by specifying a field. For example, if you have a layer of counties, and each county has a State_Name attribute, you can dissolve boundaries using the State_Name attribute. Adjacent counties will be merged together if they have the same value for State_Name. The end result is a layer of state boundaries.

Enrich Layer

This tool enriches your point or area data by getting facts about the people, places, and businesses that surround your data locations. Enrich Layer enables you to answer new questions about locations that you cannot answer with maps alone; for example, What kind of people live here? What do people like to do in this area? What are their habits and lifestyles? What kind of businesses are there in this area?

The result will be a new layer containing all demographic and geographic information from given data collections. This new information is added as fields in the table.

Export Spatial Data

With this tool, you can select and download data for a specified area of interest. Layers that you select will be added to a zip file or layer package.

Find Existing Locations

This tool selects existing features in your study area that meet a series of criteria you specify. These criteria can be based on attribute queries (for example, parcels that are vacant) and spatial queries (for example, parcels within one mile of a river).

Find Hot Spots

The Find Hot Spots tool will determine if there is any statistically significant clustering in the spatial pattern of your data.

• Are your points (crime incidents, trees, traffic accidents) really clustered? How can you be sure?
• Have you truly discovered a statistically significant hot spot (for spending, infant mortality, consistently high test scores) or would your map tell a different story if you changed the way it was symbolized?

Find Nearest

This tool finds the nearest features and, optionally, reports and ranks the distance to the nearby features. To find what's nearby, the tool can measure either straight-line distance or a selected travel mode. There are options to limit the number of nearest features to find or the search range in which to find them. The results from this tool can help you answer the following kinds of questions:

• What is the nearest park from here?
• Which hospital can be reached in the shortest drive time? How long would the trip take on a Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. during rush hour?
• What are the road distances between these major cities?
• Which of these patients reside within two miles of these chemical plants?

Find Nearest returns a layer containing the nearest features and, optionally, a line layer that links the start locations to their nearest locations. The optional line layer contains information about the start and nearest locations and the distances between.

Find Similar Locations

Based on criteria you specify, the Find Similar Locations tool measures the similarity of locations in your candidate search layer to one or more reference locations.

Interpolate Points

The Interpolate Points tool allows you to predict values at new locations based on measurements from a collection of points. The tool takes point data with values at each point and returns areas classified by predicted values, for example:

• An air quality management district has sensors that measure pollution levels. Interpolate Points can be used to predict pollution levels at locations that don't have sensors, such as locations with at-risk populations—schools or hospitals, for example.
• Predict heavy metal concentrations in crops based on samples taken from individual plants.
• Predict soil nutrient levels (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and so on) and other indicators (such as electrical conductivity) in order to study their relationships to crop yield and prescribe precise amounts of fertilizer for each location in the field.
• Meteorological applications include prediction of temperatures, rainfall, and associated variables (such as acid rain).

Merge Layers

This tool copies features from two layers into a new layer. The layers to be merged must all contain the same feature types (points, lines, or areas). You can control how the fields from the input layers are joined and copied, for example:

• You have three layers for England, Wales, and Scotland, and you want a single layer of Great Britain.
• You have 12 layers and each contains parcel information for contiguous townships. You want to join them together into a single layer, keeping only the fields that have the same name and type on the 12 input layers.

Overlay Layers

Overlay Layers combines two or more layers into one single layer. You can think of overlay as peering through a stack of maps and creating a single map containing all the information found in the stack. In fact, before the advent of GIS, cartographers would literally copy maps onto clear acetate sheets, overlay these sheets on a light table, and hand draw a new map from the overlaid data. Overlay is much more than a merging of line work; all the attributes of the features taking part in the overlay are carried through to the final product. Overlay is used to answer one of the most basic questions of geography: What is on top of what? For example:

• What parcels are within the 100-year flood plain? (Within is just another way of saying on top of.)
• What roads are within what counties?
• What land use is on top of what soil type?
• What wells are within abandoned military bases?

Plan Routes

Plan Routes determines how to efficiently divide tasks among a mobile workforce.

You provide the tool with a set of stops and the number of vehicles available to visit the stops. The tool assigns the stops to vehicles and returns routes showing how each vehicle can reach its assigned stops in the least amount of time.

With Plan Routes, mobile workforces reach more job sites in less time, which increases productivity and improves customer service.

• Inspect homes, restaurants, or construction sites.
• Provide repair, installation, or technical services.
• Deliver items and small packages.
• Make sales calls.
• Transport people from their homes to an event.

The output from Plan Routes includes a layer of stops coded by the routes to which they are assigned, a layer of routes showing the shortest paths to visit assigned stops, and, depending on whether any stops could not be reached, a layer of unassigned stops.

Summarize Nearby

This tool finds features within a specified distance of features in the analysis layer. Distance can be measured as a straight-line distance or a selected travel mode. Statistics are then calculated for the nearby features, for example:

• Calculate the total population within five minutes of driving time of a proposed new store location.
• Calculate the number of freeway access ramps within a one-mile driving distance of a proposed new store location to use as a measure of store accessibility.

Summarize Within

This tool finds features (and portions of features) within the boundaries of areas in the analysis layer, for example:

• Given a layer of watershed boundaries and a layer of land-use boundaries by land-use type, calculate total acreage of land-use type for each watershed.
• Given a layer of parcels in a county and a layer of city boundaries, summarize the average value of vacant parcels within each city boundary.