Clipping polygons and mantaining separate entities

[SaraPinedaZapata]

Hello!

I'm working with ArcMap 10.5 and I have a land cover layer and some circular buffers. I need to know what land covers  are inside the buffers, as well as calculate the area of those separetely for each buffer.

I did a clip of my buffers and land cover layer, but what I obtained was a layer where the buffers were merged depending on the land cover.

These are the buffers

This is the clip I did. As you can see the buffers that overlaped are now merged. I want them to be separated features so I can calculate the area for each one of them. I will take care of the double sums later.

Thanks I hope I was clear.

Actually, somene had a similar problem I think (https://community.esri.com/t5/geoprocessing-questions/clip-overlapping-polygons-individually-to/m-p/...). They solved with with python code for pro and it did not work for me.

[DavidPike · Accepted solution]

Tabulate intersection https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/analysis/tabulate-intersection.htm would achieve the end goal without needing this clipping step.

[SaraPinedaZapata]

Awesome!! It worked, thanks. Just out of curiosity, could you think about a different solution to do it in Arcmap?

I have pro only on my personal computer...🙃

[DavidPike]

It's an ArcMap tool also.  What version do you have?  I think it goes all the way back.

[SaraPinedaZapata]

Hey yeah. I found it. the tool worked, and I have now the output table. Do you know how can I see those results spatially?

[DavidPike]

You could join https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/data-management/add-join.htm the buffers to the tabulate intersection table by matching field.

If you need to have your data clipped to each buffer for some reason, then Intersect https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/analysis/intersect.htm might do this for you without merging the geometries.