I have contour lines that I am trying to turn into polygons. The layer has 3 spatially separate homerange areas (belonging to the same individual) that each have 10 contours based on kernel density. Using the feature to polygon function I am able to turn each contour level line into polygons. At this step I have 3 homeranges (features), however, this leaves a hole in the middle (like a donut) where the other contours are. I need the polygon to be the entire diameter, not just a donut. I have tried merging the polygons I created for each contour (giving me 6 features), and then dissolving them. The problem when I do this is that it dissolves the 3 separate features into a single feature in the attribute table, even though they are spatially separate. There are no attributes associated with the polygons created from the contour lines except the contour level (which I added), so I do not have a field to dissolve by. I have to do this for ~100 more individuals so I am trying to avoid doing it manually and develop a work flow using the model builder.
My question is whether there is a way to do one of the following:
a) create solid polygons for each contour level without the donut hole in the center;
b) assign a unique ID to contour polygons belonging to the same homerange without manually assigning an ID to each contour polygon of each homerange ( I know I could do this by merging all the contour polygons, generating an ID field and then selecting the contours associated with each of the 3 homeranges and assigning 1 of 3 unique identifiers but I want to avoid the manual selection);
or c) follow the method I outlined above where I merged the contour polygons then dissolved them and somehow split the resulting polygons into 3 polygons based on area, again without doing this manually. I have attempted to use the "split feature" tool with no luck as I dont have anything to split the feature by because the 3 polygons are not touching.
Ultimately, What I need, is the total area of the polygon for each contour level and each individual homerange. So if I have 10 contours and 3 homeranges I need to develop an attribute table that has 30 rows of data (i.e, 30 polygons).
Is this possible or am I going to have to slog it out manually?
Thank you!!!
did you create the contours from a raster using the Contour geoprocessing tool?
Using a similar process using the raster package in R, yes