How can I create national coastlines?

[SaskiaMösle]

Hi,

I am very new to ArcGIS and have the following question: I have a shapefile with around 1500 regions worldwide and want to calculate for each region the (average) distance up to the coastline of its own country (or if the country has no access to the ocean, the nearest coastline). I thought about creating national coastlines (I have a shapefile with worldwide coastlines, however, they are not country-specific) and then calculate the respective distances to these line segments. Would that work? And if so, how can I create national coastlines? Thanks for your help 🙂

[AbdullahAnter]

What is your Arc GIS license ? (Basic - Standard - Advanced )

[SaskiaMösle]

I have a university license and I'm pretty sure advanced.

[AbdullahAnter]

Use Near tool (Near ) or Generate Near Table (Generate Near Table) for that purpose. that will measure the shortest distance between coastline and each region ( the nearest coastline) .

[SaskiaMösle]

Thanks for you suggestion. However, I want to measure the distance to the OWN coastline of a country if it has one, and not just the nearest distance to the coastline, which could be the coastline of another country...

[AbdullahAnter]

Try to make target feature is national coastline (after doing intersect tool below) and Near feature is countries

[SaskiaMösle]

Thank you very much for your help, Abdullah, and sorry for my very late reply. I created the national coastlines like you suggested and everything worked out.

Now I have two shapefiles, one with the national coastlines, and one with the regions. However, I still don't know how to calculate the distance of each sub-national region to ist own coast (for coastal countries). I tried the near by group tool https://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2010/09/16/nearbygroup/ but it doesn't work (I don't know why it just displays an error). Do you have another idea how I could proceed?

Thanks again!

[AbdullahAnter]

Look to My reply below. Use intersect tool.

[AbdullahAnter]

National coastline it is for coastal country .And the coastal country intersect the coastline.

use intersect tool to make National coastline. And make the output is Line

Intersect

note.:

Before use intersect tool for coastline, you should to be sure that coastline intersect the coastal country.

if it doesn't, you will measure maximum distance between coastline and the edge for coastal country. then put this value in the XY tolerance of intersect tool.