Saturday, 20 August 2016

arcgis desktop - Is there a way to Query what's "NOT THERE"?


If you have land tenure mapping, and you're only interested in the areas for which there are no polygons in a region, is there a way to query these areas out and create a shapefile from them.


A tangible example using Mining Claim Mapping:


Various forms of land tenure are represented for an area. These areas are captured with polygon geometry. Areas include Mining Claims, and various forms of Patented Mining Lands (ie - Surface rights only, surface & mineral rights, 11 year lease, etc, etc).



In this example, If I'm ONLY interested in the areas that are not captured (which would be Crown Land), how do I go about extracting that data (data which is "NOT THERE") without manually digitizing? Is there a way to do this with a select by location query? The only thing I can come up with is to use the bpoly command in AutoCAD, but this would be a bit time consuming and would also lend itself to the possibility of oversights/errors on the part of the user.



Answer



What should be done, if you don't already have a larger study area polygon, is to create one. Then, clip/erase using the other tenure data the larger polygon to create the smaller polygons of your unused land.


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