How to identify polygons that border on bodies of water?

Question

Good morning everyone,

I'm working on a project valuing properties on an island. I'm trying to distinguish tax parcels that are "waterfront" (they border on the Atlantic ocean). Ideally, I could take each property (sourced from a KML file) and assign them a dummy variable and spit it out into a spreadsheet. What is the easiest way to do this/could anyone link me to a page that teaches me how (I just started using ArcGIS Pro). Thank you very much!

Robert_LeClair · Answer

If you have a polygon feature class of the Atlantic Ocean added to the Map View with your tax parcels, you could use the Select by Location Geoprocessing tool with the "boundary touches" parameter.  Then do a field calculation of the selected features on an attribute field like "Ocean_Touches" = 'YES'.  If you want to work with the data in Excel you can export it out to Excel if you wish.

jcarlson · Answer

Do you have a layer for the water? If you're just selecting features from Layer 1 based on touching Layer 2, that's easily doable using the Select by Location tool.