Hi all,
I am a newbie to the world of ESRI products and have only been using Arc 9.3 for about a year or so so, while doing my MSC here at Uni, so please excuse the ignorance.
I have a little mapping issue I was hoping one of you guys could help me resolve. Basically I am mapping aquatic vegetation beds in a river, (they extend from the bank inward into the river, underwater). I have done this by traveling down the river and taking GPS points at the approximate start and ends of each bed, then noting the approximate width of each bed from the river bank, hence most of my points lie about 10m from the edge of the each bank... (please see the attached Jpeg, where I have noted that the bed starts at point 225, its 5m wide on the north bank and continues, at 226 it has increased up to 10m wide and at 227 it decreased down to 5m wide again and stopped...)
Problem is that I wish to move, (unsure how to do this) each of my 800 points to the nearest edge of my river polygon shapefile and then (probably) have to convert the river polygon to a polyline file. Following which I would like to split the polyline file at each point and discard the bits that are not vegetated, (eg the bits between my various aquatic plant beds). The resulting polyline file I would then like to flat-buffer with a distance specified by my point shapefile to give the accurate size of the bed?
Ok ok so I am sure there is a probably a shorter way to do this and I am wide open for any suggestions and help, before my supervisor decreases my life expectancy drastically . 🙂
