Calculating amount of habitat surrounding a point

[JudithScarl]

Hi!  Thanks for reading this.

I am trying to calculate the amount of habitat surrounding a point.  I have a raster file which depicts the habitat envelope- that is, all potential habitat across my area of interest.  I have another raster file depicting different types of habitat across a much broader area.  My habitat of interest is conifer.

The question I want to ask is- how much conifer habitat is within my habitat envelope and within an X kilometer radius of each point?  (I'd like to obtain values for 1 km, 2 km, 5km, etc for each point). 

I suspect that this is a two-step process, since I'll have to limit the conifer habitat to that which is within my habitat envelope and then calculate how much area that occupies around each point.

I have access to ArcView and ArcInfo 10 along with the Spatial Analyst extension.  Can anyone give me any advice for what tools to use to do this and how to execute their use?

Thanks so much,
Judith

[EricRice]

Hi Judith,

First, buffer your points with the desired distances. You'll use the polygons in our Zonal tools from Spatial Analyst as the Zone Features.  Since you're only interested in conifer data you may consider using Extract by Attribute to create a raster of just that for use in our Zonal tools.

When running the zonal tools, set the processing extent to the habitat envelope raster.

Regards,
Eric

[JudithScarl]

Thank you, Eric!