Calculate Intersection Within Range of Polygon Edge?

TanyaHarrison

I have a set of x,y coordinates spanning the entire northern hemisphere of Mars, and I want to see how many of them fall within 10° of the edges of a given shapefile (polygon). Is there a way I can quickly edit the shapefile to create a version with the boundaries extended by 10°, or is there a way to calculate the intersection of my existing files to account for this 10°? Since the shapes are irregular it would be time consuming to manually extend the boundaries by creating new shapes.

XanderBakker

I have a set of x,y coordinates spanning the entire northern hemisphere of Mars, and I want to see how many of them fall within 10° of the edges of a given shapefile (polygon). Is there a way I can quickly edit the shapefile to create a version with the boundaries extended by 10°, or is there a way to calculate the intersection of my existing files to account for this 10°? Since the shapes are irregular it would be time consuming to manually extend the boundaries by creating new shapes.

Hi,

Although I don't know what support ArcGIS has for data on Mars, the normal approach would be to use the Select By Location. Extended Help topic is found here: Using Select By Location (10.2)

Use the Intersect spatial selection method. Switch on the option "Apply search distance", enter "10" and use decimal degrees as units. In case you only want to only obtain those feature that are outside of your polygon, you can perform a second select by location on the same layers, but now choosing the "remove from currently selected features" option for the selection method (top of dialog) and switch off the option apply search distance.

Kind regards,

Xander