topic Re: Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access) in ArcGIS Online Questions

Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access)

IntgPlsC — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:21:46 GMT

I've been learning ArcGIS through my school, and we started working on the tutorial Map and analyze food access from ArcGIS Learn. At some point (I think the section is titled Summarize potential food deserts), we are instructed to use the Summarize Within analysis tool with Emergency Food Providers as the summary polygon layer and a previously-created Enriched Ward Boundaries layer as the input features. Although there is clearly-visible overlap between the EFP layer and the EWB layer, Summarize Within returns only the warning "Empty layer generated."

Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Re: Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access)

Koen — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 18:38:57 GMT

Hey @IntgPlsC thanks for reaching out! I'll be going through the tutorial to see if I am able to reproduce the issue, this might take me a little bit due to the length of the tutorial. Could you confirm if under section "Summarize potential food deserts", question 3, do you have the same 'Count of features' in both the input and summary polygon layer?

Screenshot:

Re: Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access)

IntgPlsC — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:12:39 GMT

Hey Koen! Thanks for responding so quickly.
Yes, the EFP and EWB layers have 258 and 8 features respectively.

Screenshot:

Once again, thank you so much!

Re: Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access)

LGriff — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:52:39 GMT

I'm curious if you ever found a fix for this. We are working through a different tutorial (Use species distribution patterns to assess protected areas) but are running into a similar problem where the resulting layer doesn't have any data in the table that is generated

Re: Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access)

SarahAmbrose — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:38:59 GMT

Hi @IntgPlsC,

I've been able to reproduce this issue on my end, thank you for finding it. While we look into it, can you please try using the "DC Detailed Ward Boundaries" as input to the Enrich Layer tool instead of the "DC Ward Boundaries".

Currently, the issue looks isolated to that layer.

Thanks again for letting us know,

Sarah Ambrose
Web Analysis Product Engineer

Re: Empty Output from Summarize Within (tutorial: Map and analyze food access)

SarahAmbrose — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:42:27 GMT

Hi @LGriff, I was able to reproduce the issue @IntgPlsC reported, but I wasn't able to find an issue in the species distribution tutorial. Can you please let me know if you're still seeing that issue and aren't working with Support Service already. If so, can you create a new post and share the details about what step you're seeing it at and screenshot the inputs to the tool that's resulting in 0? I think the potential gotchya is setting the environment settings as the display extent in Overlay Layers - so when you run that tool please make sure you're centered on Africa.

Thank you,

Sarah Ambrose