Spatial cover breakdown question

[JulienCarlier]

Spatial cover breakdown question: I have a shapefile of landscape characters (polygons) and a shapefile of land cover classes (polygons). Both are of the same region, i.e. they overlap.

Is there a tool to obtain a breakdown of the spatial cover of all land use polygons within each landscape character polygon? Ultimately, the result would be a table with landscape characters as rows and the land use cover breakdown in columns.

I have tried Clip, Union and Intersect, but the problem is new polygons are being created each time, rather than preserving the original landscape character shapefile and examining the cover of land use within.

Any ideas are very welcome, many thanks in advance.

[DanPatterson]

Ideally you need the spatial analyst extension and perform a...

Zonal Statistics as Table (Spatial Analyst)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation 

using raster versions of your inputs.

[JulienCarlier]

Thanks Dan,

I did find a work-around just now using the following sequence:

1) Use the Overlay (Intersect) of the landscape character shapefile and the land cover shapefile ->creates a new shapefile of the intersect.

2) calculate the geometry of the land cover in attributes of the intersect shapefile.

3) extract attributes table and use Pivot tool pivot land cover classes as new attribute fields.

4) join the new pivot table back to the intersect shapefile using Joins.

5) extract the joined intersect shapefile as a new feature (joins do not perform well for subsequent analyses).

6) use Dissolve tool to reduce the number of attributes back to the number of landscape character features.

This is quite a process, so will try Zonal Statistics as you suggested to speed up the analysis.

All the best,
Julien