Tabulate area overlapping buffers

[ChantelSloan]

This should be pretty straight forward, but I have been struggling with model builder. I have a file of about 30,000 individual buffers, many of which overlap, and a separate land cover raster layer. I simply want to use model builder to loop through each buffer and use tabulate area to calculate the land cover within each (percent forested, percent urban, etc). I've seen others post similar questions, but haven't been able to get the solutions to quite work. I pasted in a screen shot of the model so far. I also tried it using the tool for iterating over rows, but that didn't work either. The current error message says that the tabulate_shape_each file does not match the format in the file I want to append to, but they should be the same. Ideas?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]19013[/ATTACH]

[curtvprice]

The Tabulate Area tool provides different output fields depending on what it finds in its input, so you can't append them without doing fancy footwork with field maps - not easy in ModelBuilder.

Have you tried the Feature Weights To Table tool in the NAWQA toolbox? It creates a long skinny table which you can can tabulate using the Tabulate Weight Table tool (or you could do a pivot table in Excel).

ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/nonvisible/cr/nact

[EricRice]

Greetings,

You can mitigate schema differences by using the "No Test" option in the Append tool. However, the model is not set up correctly as-is. You're missing Collect Values - a model only tool. Also, Append or Merge should be in another model since you only want to run it once, after you've 'collected' all the iterations. This means that everything from the iterator through zonal tools and finally collect values needs to be a submodel inserted into the main model containing Append or Merge.

See: Integrating a model within a model subsection, "Advanced use of model iterators"

I would use Merge rather than Append here.

Best,
Eric

[ChantelSloan]

Thank you both for your help with this issue.  It seems like in the NAWQA toolbox, the "Tabulate Features to Percent" tool should do exactly what I need.  However, I get errors each time I try it.  The error messages are not very descriptive:

Executing: TabulateFeaturesToPercent full_address_2kmbuffer_has_asthma_2 FID tnlancov06 C:\full_address_percent # 9999 OVERLAP
Start Time: Tue Nov 13 15:11:07 2012
Running script TabulateFeaturesToPercent...
Creating area-weight table...
Geoprocessing error on line 55 of C:\Documents and Settings\sloancd\Desktop\NACT\scripts\FeatureWeightsToTable.py:
Executing: FeatureWeightsToTable full_address_2kmbuffer_has_asthma_2 FID tnlancov06 "\\ds.vanderbilt.edu\ncsdfs\HSR\users\sloancd\My Documents\ArcGIS\Default.gdb\xx0" # 9999 #...

Have you run into this issue before using this package?  Or do I need to contact USGS to figure it out?

[curtvprice]

Have you run into this issue before using this package?  Or do I need to contact USGS to figure it out?

Uh, that would be me.

Suggestions:

1) Set your geoprocessing scratch and current workspace to a folder. It looks like you have let it default, which is breaking the tool.

2) As the help I wrote for the tool suggests, something to try is to run the Feature Weights To Table and Tabulate Weight Table tools separately.