Simplify Polygons-Lakes

[AikateriniTsampazi]

Hello to everyone,

I edited some lakes in Europe but I did it very precisely and now I need to simplify my lakes. I also have rivers that are connected with lakes and the topology is ok because I checked it. Do you have any suggestions of how to simplify my lakes without loosing topology and having a good result. (I edited lakes in 1:40000 but I need it in 1:500000 and in this scale is too precise 😕 ). Would be also a solution to use smooth polygons or not? Which one is the better solution?

Thanks in advance
Katerina

[AikateriniTsampazi]

Hello again,

thanks a lot for answering my question. Actually I have seen simplify and smooth for polygons in ArcGis and I have read about them. Just, I did not know what was better for my problem and I was wondering if anyone had a similar problem and how he handled it. I have not try representation tools but I will read about it and then I will start trying every solution. Any other suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks again for suggestions  🙂

P.S I use 10.1 version

[DanLee]

Katerina,

In case you haven't solved your problem, you can try the following:

1.  Run Feature To Point with INSIDE option to get points from polygons; they carry polygon attributes and will be used as label points in step 5 later.
2.  Run Feature To Line tools with both rivers and lakes as inputs. The result contains rivers and lake lines which are broken where rivers intersect.
3.  Select lake lines by any of their attributes that the rivers lines don't have.
4.  Run Simplify Lines; the endpoints of the lake lines won't move (remaining at the river connections).
5.  Run Feature To Polygons, specify the label points you got in step 1, to reconstruct simplified lake polygons.

Be aware of the possibility that the label points may not be inside the corresponding resulting polygons, if the shape changes are significant. You may need to use Spatial Join to help analyze them.

Hope this helps.

[AikateriniTsampazi]

Thank you very much for the answer. I will try the suggested solution.

Katerina,

In case you haven't solved your problem, you can try the following:

1.  Run Feature To Point with INSIDE option to get points from polygons; they carry polygon attributes and will be used as label points in step 5 later.
2.  Run Feature To Line tools with both rivers and lakes as inputs. The result contains rivers and lake lines which are broken where rivers intersect.
3.  Select lake lines by any of their attributes that the rivers lines don't have.
4.  Run Simplify Lines; the endpoints of the lake lines won't move (remaining at the river connections).
5.  Run Feature To Polygons, specify the label points you got in step 1, to reconstruct simplified lake polygons.

Be aware of the possibility that the label points may not be inside the corresponding resulting polygons, if the shape changes are significant. You may need to use Spatial Join to help analyze them.

Hope this helps.