Tool for determining which layer occupies most area within a section and resymbolizing it as such

Question

Is there a tool that can look at a section that contains multiple layers, determine which layer occupies the most area, and create a new dataset that shows each section only containing that symbology? For example if a water body occupied 1/4 of a section and a land feature occupied 3/4 of the section, the output would show the entire section as land. (I'm not sure if this question is more suitable for the Geoprocessing board, if so please let me know).

If this exists, is there also a hierarchy that can be applied?  I.e. some layers have more importance than others.

Thank you!

DavidPike · Answer

Not sure, I'll have a think.  Also try https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/environment-settings/parallel-processing-factor.htm

However I'd highly recommend trying everything out on a very small subset of the data until you know that my proposed solution actually works.

veronicampbell · Answer

Thank you for this suggestion. I gave the Split tool a try and saw that it was exporting individual shape files for each section - this was taking a long time as the dataset is quite large, so I ended up stopping the tool. Do you happen to know a different route I might go for splitting very large datasets? Thank you!

DavidPike · Answer

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/analysis/split.htm then a spatial join  https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/analysis/spatial-join.htm with the largest_overlap method to append the largest land feature name to the section polygons.

Then do another spatial join to transfer the land name back to the land polygons in a new field, then a definition query to only display the largest land parcels (original_land_name = spatialjoin_landname)