topic Re: How to create variables for coastal cities? in ArcGIS Mapping and Charting Questions

How to create variables for coastal cities?

JoãoFrancisco_Pugliese — Mon, 01 May 2017 16:00:06 GMT

Hello,

I have a shapefile for a coastline, I have the boundaries and centroid points for municipalities. I created a measure of "Distance to coastline" but I also would like to know if a city area is in contact with the coast or not.

I attempted to find it online but did not come up with anything.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
João

Re: How to create variables for coastal cities?

forestknutsen1 — Mon, 01 May 2017 16:37:03 GMT

You could run an intersect with points as the output... If you get a point at least part of the city is on the coast.

How Intersect works—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Intersect—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Re: How to create variables for coastal cities?

XanderBakker — Mon, 01 May 2017 17:07:31 GMT

If your coast lines are indeed lines, you could use a select by location and apply a tolerance (search distance):

If your coast "lines" are polygons representing land you could evaluate if the coast polygon borders touch the cities but you wont be able to apply a search distance:

If your coast lines are polygons representing the sea, you could use the intersect and apply a search distance to account for lack of precision between the layers.