Please help, been struggling for over a week. "Neighborhood" of land cover classes across the landscape?

[witsgoblue13]

Hey all, I am assuming this is possible, just not sure which tools specifically even after reading through multiple how-to's and ArcPro guides. Using a dataset like the National Land Cover Database (raster but can convert to shapefile for specific classes if needed) if I wanted to look at a state, say Montana, and determine how many parcels of cropland, open water, and grasslands are in contact with one another across the state, where they were located and rough size (have the sizes calculated for each parcel), what tool(s) would I use to accomplish this? Essentially wanting to rank a complex of these fields and grasslands and water sources across the landscape by overall size. Parcels could be contiguous or within 1 km of each other. I don't think I can give an award but good karma to anyone who can help me out or point me in the right direction. My advisor is out of the country and this is a major hang up.

[DanPatterson]

Before you get too deep into the details, there is one obvious tool to get you started

Polygon Neighbors (Analysis)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

[AmZk]

If I'm understanding your goal correctly, I think I would start by creating a new field in your NLCD attribute table to hold a binary 0/1 for if a cover type is crop/grass/water or not. You can use calculate field and Reclassify for this. You'll end up with any cells of crop/grass/water that touch each other being in the same category, so if you use a raster to polygon process it will turn these aggregated lumps of crop/grass/water into polygons. Then you can get the area of the polygons, and if you need to go back and extract the specific cover types from the polygons you can use a tool like Tabulate Area. The only thing I haven't addressed is the "contiguous or within 1 km of each other part" because I'm not really familiar with how that'd be done.