ArcGIS Tutorials Blog

Measure the benefits of green space with metrics 

Pfingstweid Park in Zurich West is an example of how urban spaces can adapt to meet the evolving needs of a community. Originally used for grazing land, it became a community garden for local factory workers after World War I. As the area transitioned to residential use, the park was redesigned and reopened in 2015 through a community design competition.

In this tutorial, you'll step into the role of a planner for Zurich, giving new purpose to Pfingstweid Park as it continues to evolve and serve the changing needs of the community. Green space in a city can serve many important functions. First, you'll review your colleague's metrics to determine whether the park provides enough green space per resident to meet the World Health Organization's recommendations. Then, you'll build new metrics to analyze how these green spaces contribute to reducing stormwater runoff. This aligns with Zurich's "Sponge City" initiative, which aims to improve climate resilience by reducing impervious surfaces and enhancing stormwater management. These metrics will help measure the effectiveness of green spaces in managing stormwater and supporting the city's environmental goals.

Publish data from ArcGIS Pro to ArcGIS Online 

You've created a layer in ArcGIS Pro that shows homelessness by state in the United States, and now you want to share it with the public. In this tutorial, you'll publish your layer as a web layer in ArcGIS Online, where it can be viewed by anyone with a URL to the data.

Set up custom data for infographics in ArcGIS Pro 

California's climate disruptions are characterized by increasingly severe wildfires, prolonged droughts, and extreme heatwaves. All these issues are exacerbated by climate change, which threatens housing markets, water resources, agriculture, and overall ecosystem stability. Climate-driven disruptions have continued to grow in frequency and severity, impacting businesses in California.

Many investors, insurers, financial services providers, and nonprofit organizations rely on information about localized physical climate risks, like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. The outcomes of these risk projections have significant economic consequences, including allocating investment capital, impacting housing prices and demographic shifts, and prioritizing adaptation infrastructure projects.

With the help of FEMA's National Risk Index data and the custom data setup workflow in Business Analyst, decision-makers and executives can fully understand how region-specific risks impede their operations or the downstream impact they will have. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to integrate this data source, set up custom variables, categorize them, and apply them to assess risks effectively for your specific region.

Find suitable areas for new affordable housing 

Affordable housing is an increasing problem, especially in urban areas. A lack of affordable housing can impact a city's growth, livability, and sense of economic mobility. As housing becomes more expensive, renter-occupied housing units increase, diminishing the percentage of residents able to build wealth through their home. Expensive aging homes also cause higher homeowner expenses for improvements. Ultimately, residents may leave a city that does not have enough affordable housing, causing population decline.

In 2023, the United States Census Bureau estimated that the population of Long Beach, California, had declined since 2020. This decline might be due to high housing prices compared to the city's average household income. In this tutorial, you'll use infographics in ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App to learn more about housing in Long Beach. Then, you'll perform a suitability analysis to determine which census block groups throughout the city would most benefit from the development of new affordable housing.

Download census data 

The United States Census Bureau collects and shares a massive amount of accurate, high-quality data about the population of the United States. This data can be combined with spatial data, such as geographic boundaries, and mapped using GIS.

In this tutorial, a health network in Mesa County, Colorado, wants to offer mobile primary care centers that bring services to residents who may be underserved. To determine the best areas to target, the network plans to map census data about age and poverty.

To help them, you'll go to the Census Bureau website, find relevant data, and download it. Then, you'll upload the data to ArcGIS Online and add it to a web map as a table. Lastly, you'll join the table to geographic boundary data and display it on the map. The final result will show areas of Mesa County with a large number of older adults who may require financial assistance.

Plan routes to optimize deliveries 

Farm Collective in Canterbury, New Zealand, offers a community supported agriculture (CSA) program to deliver fresh produce directly to customers. Farm Collective's CSA program is rapidly growing and the business requires help in planning its produce deliveries. The routing functionality in Map Viewer uses the ArcGIS Routing service to find the most efficient routes for multiple vehicles based on constraints like travel capacity and stop duration. In this tutorial, you'll use the Plan Routes tool to optimize the CSA deliveries for a fleet of drivers.

Get started with ArcGIS Utility Network for water 

In this tutorial, you will act as a GIS analyst who works for a water distribution utility. A new residential development is being built in your service territory and you will use ArcGIS Utility Network to provide the operations, planning, and engineering departments with the information they need to complete the work. Once construction is complete, you will use the editing and validation capabilities of Utility Network to ensure the geographic information system (GIS) accurately reflects the way equipment was constructed in the field.

Along the way, you'll learn how to trace subnetworks, identify affected customers, create and edit utility network features, validate topology, and update subnetworks.

Get started with ArcGIS Utility Network for electric 

The Public Works Department of the City of Lisle, Illinois, has been using the geometric network to manage its municipal electric network. Your manager has tasked you with exploring the capabilities of a utility network in ArcGIS to model and analyze your network's assets.

To help you get started, a consultant has populated a small subset of your service territory with data from the Electric Utility Network Essentials Foundation. In this tutorial, you'll use this sample data to experiment with the utility network's functionality. You'll perform traces to answer questions about your network, run reports to identify customer count, and perform a service line extension to bring power to a new customer followed by an update subnetwork operation to incorporate this service line into the subnetwork.

Create catchment areas for a cancer center 

Since 2012, delineating catchment areas has become an imperative for National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer centers. These catchment areas are contiguous geographic areas from which cancer centers draw most of their patient population. They are foundational for planning, resource allocation, engagement, and ensuring equitable access to services.

In this tutorial, you'll create four potential catchment areas for a fictitious cancer center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, using the following methods:

• Identifying counties adjacent to the county the cancer center is in
• Creating a 60-mile buffer around the cancer center
• Creating a 60-mile driving distance service area around the cancer center
• Identifying the area where the cancer center's core patients live, with outliers excluded

Using infographics and a map series layout, you'll compare the four potential catchment areas so the center's leadership can make an informed decision about which to submit to the NCI.

Create a custom application to analyze cancer center catchment areas 

In 1971, through the National Cancer Act, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Centers Program was created. This program recognizes and funds leading cancer centers performing state-of-the-art research that deliver cutting-edge treatments to the patients in their service areas, commonly called cancer center catchment areas.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a map that visualizes the coverage of National Cancer Institute cancer center catchment areas across the United States, including their designated cancer centers and then further analyze the demographic composition of each catchment area to learn more about the population being served. In the context of health care, catchment areas are the geographic regions where patients are referred to a specific health-care facility or service. This allows for strategic planning and resource allocation for the cancer center facilities to ensure they are serving their patients effectively. Cancer center catchment areas are self-defined geographic areas that each NCI-Designated Cancer Center serves or intends to serve in the research it conducts, communities it engages, and the outreach it performs.

Create a custom infographic for a catchment area 

In the United States, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, awards grants to support cancer control measures for organizations that meet rigorous standards. The process is highly competitive and achieving the concomitant NCI designation is prestigious. The NCI designation and the grant award continue for five to seven years before renewal is required.

In this tutorial, you will take on the role of analyst as part of the team preparing a renewal application for their NCI sponsored Cancer Center Support Grant. You will examine the current cancer center catchment area for your organization and make plans for strategic expansion of the catchment, knowing that NCI will appreciate your cancer center's effort to serve more people. To share information about the population contained within the catchment, you'll customize an infographic that you can include in your grant application.

Extract high-resolution land cover with GeoAI 

High-resolution land cover layers are valuable tools for mapping and understanding the environment. They provide detailed information about the different types of land cover—such as vegetation, buildings, water bodies, and roads—at a fine-grained spatial resolution. One approach to creating such layers is to use GeoAI applied to drone imagery, classifying the imagery pixels into their corresponding land cover types. While it is possible to train your own deep learning model for this task, you can also take advantage of a pretrained model provided by ArcGIS Living Atlas.

In this tutorial, focused on the Township of Alexandra, South Africa, you'll try out this approach in ArcGIS Pro, with the goal of identifying green spaces and computing their overall surface area. Information about green space distribution is crucial for urban planning, resource allocation, and social development initiatives.

Perform species distribution modeling 

Feral swine (Sus scrofa) are an invasive species that destroy or degrade acres of natural habitat each year, threatening biodiversity and disrupting native species. Their rooting and foraging can also damage agriculture and irrigation systems, and they can carry infectious diseases that pass to domestic cattle. Modeling the distribution of these animals based on observations from iNaturalist can help wildlife and conservation managers track, assess, and contain the destruction.

In this tutorial, you'll focus on two methods for species distribution modeling, Forest-based and Boosted Classification and Regression, and Presence-only Prediction. Both methods can be used individually or in combination to create and assess species distribution.

The approach outlined in this tutorial is intended to demonstrate some of the methods available for species distribution modeling. It is not intended to prescribe a workflow or singular approach to the topic. When using these methods in your work, be sure to apply your own subject matter expertise on the phenomena being modeled to produce the best results.

Use an AI assistant to explore the pickleball market 

Whether you work for a commercial company that's trying to start a new business or are part of a local government promoting economic development, or anyone simply trying to understand an area, ArcGIS Business Analyst provides data, tools, and workflows for everyone. Gain access to thousands of demographic and business variables that help in many private and public sector workflows, including expanding to a new business location or promoting economic development. Business Analyst Web App includes an AI assistant—Business Analyst Assistant (Beta). It can be used by new users to learn about the app and existing users for productivity. It can be used to get you started creating a map or as an embedded part of your workflow.

In this tutorial, you are interested in expanding a business that sells pickleball equipment. You will start by creating a map showing the locations of recreation centers and where people have bought more recreation sporting goods than the national average. Using the assistant, you will generate a color-coded map showing pickleball activity to help inform where your next target market should be located.

Use demographic data to study regional markets 

You work for a regional convenience store chain, Casey's General Stores. You are hoping to expand your market to the southwest side of your existing territory, and do not want to intrude on the territory of your competitor to the southwest, Allsup's. You will work to gain a better understanding of your chain's region and plan an ideal location using GIS tools, business and demographic data, and the geographic approach. In this tutorial, you will use points of interest search and color-coded maps to examine the data. You will study the chains' territories, examine their sales volume, incorporate projected population numbers, and propose a new market based on your analysis.

Derive products from satellite imagery with ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro 

As a remote sensing specialist working with the City of San Diego, you have been tasked with generating Reality mapping products—a digital surface model (DSM), a True Ortho, and an integrated DSM mesh—from high resolution satellite imagery to support an upcoming harbor expansion project. The input data comprises multiple overlapping high-resolution multispectral images captured by Maxar's WorldView-3 and WorldView-2 satellite sensors. To process these images and derive high quality Reality mapping products, you'll use ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro.

In this tutorial, you'll download the input data and create a workspace to manage it. You'll then improve the image alignment using tie points and other photogrammetric processes. Finally, you'll generate a high-resolution DSM, a True Ortho, and an integrated DSM mesh from the aligned images. While this workflow will be performed at a small extent for brevity, ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro is routinely used to process much larger extents, such as the DSM mesh displayed in this example 3D scene.

Explore an urban model 

The City of Fullerton, California, is planning an update to its general plan. California state law requires that general plans address land use, circulation, housing, open space, conservation, safety, and noise. A city may include additional elements based on the topics important to the city. In this tutorial, you'll review the proposed Rail District Specific Plan that city planners have built in ArcGIS Urban to give feedback. You'll also explore several other building projects around the city using analysis tool including shadow and line of sight analysis to better understand how the community landscape might change.

Manage and communicate emergency information 

Emergencies—such as floods, fires, earthquakes, and storms—present recurring challenges to communities around the world. Sharing a common operational picture allows organizations to respond quickly and effectively, tracking impacts and coordinating and allocating resources. In this tutorial, you will take the role of an emergency manager in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, responding to flooding. You will install and configure the Emergency Management Operations Solution and use it to share data with other responders and the community.

Map floods with SAR data and deep learning 

Flooding is one of the most frequent and costly types of natural disasters. Flood mapping is traditionally performed using local aerial observations or ground surveys. However, when flooding is widespread, these methods become prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, aerial observation can be challenging or impossible due to obstructive weather conditions. During flooding events, thick clouds can also prevent the use of optical satellite imagery for visualization and analysis. In such cases, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery is valuable, since it can penetrate through clouds and hazy atmospheric conditions, allowing continuous observation and mapping of floods.

In the Spring of 2019, severe flooding, referred to as the Great Flood of 2019, impacted 14 million people across multiple states in the Midwest of the United States. The St. Louis, Missouri, region experienced significant flooding. In this tutorial, as an image analyst for the disaster management regional agency, you are tasked with mapping the flood using a pretrained deep learning model and Sentinel-1 SAR imagery in ArcGIS Pro. 

Prepare an indicator layer for an equity index 

Local, state, and federal governments aim to understand their community, either through listening sessions or community meetings, and even by working across departments to build indices. An index is often used to inform decision-making but, more importantly, help leaders and communities understand the current conditions.

In this tutorial, your organization wants to build an index to help the community measure equity and identify areas for improvement. You are tasked with developing a set of indicators to identify which areas of the city are experiencing cumulative burdens.

Set up data to expand an ATM network 

A bank wants to expand its ATM network. It plans to use ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App to analyze potential ATM locations based on attributes such as visibility, distance from the street, and the number of nearby parking spaces. However, sites in a default Business Analyst project don't have these attributes.

In this tutorial, you'll create a project with custom site attributes to suit the bank's needs. Then, you'll create sites for candidate ATM locations and existing ATM locations that include these attributes. When you complete this tutorial, your project will be set up for on-site data collection and analysis.

Model conservation suitability 

In this tutorial, you will take the role of a Kenyan conservation professional using spatially informed decision making tools to prioritize areas for conservation to reach 30x30 in Kenya.

You will use layers from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World to determine how much area is currently conserved and how much more needs to be conserved to meet that goal. Once you have done so, you will use Suitability Modeler in ArcGIS Pro to analyze multiple data layers to determine high priority areas for conservation in order to meet targets of the UN Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

Create a Python script tool 

Python scripting makes it possible to automate workflows in ArcGIS Pro. In this tutorial, you will start with a working script that automates a typical geoprocessing workflow. You will use this script to create a custom Python script tool that can be used by others in ArcGIS Pro. Making a script tool allows your code to be shared with others, who can use it without knowing Python.

Explore imagery – Spatial resolution 

One important characteristic of imagery data is its resolution. There are four types of resolution: spatial, temporal, spectral, and radiometric. In this tutorial, you'll learn about spatial resolution.

You'll become familiar with the concept of spatial resolution and examine satellite imagery of different spatial resolutions in ArcGIS Pro. Your exploration will focus on the region of Pembamoto, Tanzania, where an innovative regreening project is taking place. You'll also apply your knowledge of spatial resolution to change the cell size of imagery using resampling and verify your results using the measuring tools.

Get started with ArcGIS Data Pipelines 

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) maintains a database of capital improvement projects as a .csv table. However, other departments within the city would like to know additional information about each capital project, such as the age of each project from its initial design or which neighborhood contains each capital project.

In the past, adding additional information to this list of park projects has been a time-consuming, manual process. Specifically, it entails:

• Querying projects that are in the construction phase
• Projecting data to an appropriate coordinate system for New York City
• Calculating the amount of time that has passed since the project was initially designed
• Determining which neighborhood tabulation area the project falls within
• Determining which community district each project falls within
• Removing numerous attributes that are not necessary for the stakeholders
• Renaming three attribute fields whose current names are vague and unintuitive

To automate this workflow and keep your data up to date, you'll use ArcGIS Data Pipelines to extract information from the New York City's OpenData website, load it into ArcGIS Online, and transform it by adding the requested attributes. Finally, you'll have this data pipeline run on a schedule to keep your list of capital projects current.