Count overlapping features
Hello. I have around 250,000 polygons (representing building footprints) to each of which I have applied a 10m buffer (no dissolve). I then use the Count Overlaps tool to investigate how many of these buffers intersect once, twice etc with neighbouring buffers. The results do not appear reliable. In many cases, buffers with 0 overlaps appear to have a count of 1 (overlap). In other cases where there are clearly multiple overlaps the polygons are also counted as 1 with the overlapping area counted as 2. I have checked for duplicate geometry and also separately projected the buffers with dissolve to see if my eyes are deceiving me. I also find that with counts >1 the tool only highlights the (sometimes tiny but important) overlapping area and not the entire overlapping polygons making it difficult to visually pinpoint which buffers are actually intersecting. Moreover, it would be really great if there was a way to count the total number of overlapping polygons (forming a larger cluster) rather than just count the number of overlaps.
Before I plunge into doing this arduous but necessary task manually (by selecting each buffer and then editing a newly created attribute field to match the number of overlaps I can see), I would appreciate any guidance on any of the above.
Thanks. The COUNT_FC field has only two classes: 0 and 1. I tried adding more classes from the drop-down in symbology but it only returns those two. Not quite right. Something I am doing (or have already done) wrong?
@CristoforosRomanos I see what's going on now!
I tried it on my end and it worked. I did buildings with a buffer and the overlaps were correct. You were right in using the COUNT_ field for symbolizing. The tool counts a single non overlap area as 1. Then, anything over that is an overlap area. So in my screenshot you can see single buildings have no overlap, which have a value of 1. Then 1 overlap area is a value of 2, and so on.
