Clip Heat Map to Country Borders

Question

Hello,

I am a GIS student who is still fairly new to ArcGIS Pro. I'm making a map of bird distribution and utilizing the heat map feature. I have added a layer of crowdsourced reports of a species of bird that's using x,y data; I assume this is a point layer.

My problem is that I want the extraneous parts of the heat map that is outside the border of a state/country border to be clipped or hidden. The blue portions of my heat map in the attached image 1 are what trying to remove or mask/clip. I've tried a number of solutions but none seem to give me my desired result. The masking button under Feature Layer tab gets close to what I want, but it is inverted (See image 2). Essentially, I want the heat map to be limited to land, as the heat map "bleeds" outside the country boundary.

I appreciate any advice or help, I am trying to learn!

Robert_LeClair · Answer

You're welcome!  So the data layer you're working with inside ArcGIS Pro can be local (i.e. shapefiles, geodatabase feature class) and may be of a points geometry type.  If so, then one can create an on the fly heat map using the Heat Map Symbology in the Map View.  You can read more about it here.  There are other Geoprocessing tools where you can create a raster from a points feature class and then run the density tools to create a surface like I attached in my earlier post.

tayloropossum · Answer

Thank you for your reply! As I said I am still new to ArcGIS as such I'm not familiar with this data layer. Is this something I'd have to download from ArcGIS online or another site? Or is it something I can find within the program?

Robert_LeClair · Answer

Related question - I'm presuming you're using the Heat Map symbology option for a points layer in your Map View, correct?  If you have the Spatial Analyst extension, you can run the Point Density or Kernel Density GP tools to create an output raster dataset.  In the GP tools Environment Settings, you can set the Mask to a polygon layer in your Map View.  For the output, you can choose a Heatmap #xyz color scheme.