Latest Contributions by ShaunWalbridge

Ben, Those are good questions, and I think doing an accuracy assessment of the variation in the years of Landscan would be a great thing to have, and could probably stand up as its own publication. I'm not aware of any specific group which has done this, and in the past when I've worked with Landscan we've made some rather crude assumptions when looking at the data over time. I don't think this has been done before, in part because the Landscan data has a cost, and is less frequently used in analyses than its free counterparts like CIESIN's gridded population datasets. I haven't done time-effects models, but I imagine that with some careful modeling this could be done meaningfully. You may want to look more into the existing literature published by users of Landscan to see if others have tried similar approaches. If you're only interested in particular parts of the world, you may be able to incorporate census data to predict expected differences and account for the error in Landscan. Overall, it sounds like a great project, but I'm not aware of anyone who's done this already. cheers, Shaun ... View more

It looks like it might be a 3D localization file produced by TOPCON's TopSURV, as it's documented in their manual. Probably your best bet is to try using the tools they provide and see if it can be converted to something useable outside their software. It may also be a text file, but I'm not sure what the values represent -- probably they can help in interpreting what it contains and how it can be applied in a GIS context. cheers, Shaun ... View more

Most of the tools for creating contours assume you have an elevation dataset, like a raster or a TIN, which the contour lines can be derived from. It is possible to interpolate between the existing contours you have, but fairly tricky to do. The approach Mark mentions above is probably your best bet. Right now, you have contours which are at different heights, so each line contains the height (or depth) of the values along it. If you convert those lines into points, you can interpolate a surface, and make a "fake" DEM which includes the data that you do have (from the contours). Then, you can use that new raster DEM to create contours at the resolution of your choosing. Note that these will be interpolated, and may not be accurate. So, taking your contours, this would look something like: Data Management Tools > Features > Feature Vertices to Points Spatial Analyst Tools > Interpolation > IDW (there are many other approaches to interpolation, IDW is perhaps the simplest). Spatial Analyst Tools > Surface > Contour cheers, Shaun ... View more

Have you tried the Surface Volume tool in 3D analyst? ... View more

Hello Joe, Yes, you can perform a Viewshed analysis which should do what you're looking for. cheers, Shaun ... View more

I don't believe that Hawthorne has yet released a version of GME compatible with ArcGIS 10.2 -- the site shows 10.1 as the latest version supported. Jake Wall has a package explcitly for movement ecology, ArcMET, and it does support MCP, but I'm not sure if it's yet available for 10.2 either -- you might want to check with him. Generally, the third party extensions from the scientific community aren't lock-step with the latest releases, as it can take a while to have enough new users on the platform to justify the time required to build a release for that version. cheers, Shaun ... View more

James, Assuming 32bit values, you're still only looking at something like 268MB (236*552*540*4 bytes) of data, which should fit into memory without a problem. Doing that for both your rasters and points would be a good place to start as Curtis mentions, as your sampling has to iterate over all points and rasters which isn't particularly fast. Another option that would take more work is to stack the rasters using multidimensional arrays, such as with NumPy or NetCDF. Then, you can pull out the values of all 540 rasters by sampling a single vector (all rasters at one point) which should greatly improve performance. cheers, Shaun ... View more

Rosita, In my own toolboxes, I have these lines: local_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)) sys.path.insert(0, local_path) That will get the path of the current file (in this case, the .pyt) and prepend it to Python's system path. cheers, Shaun ... View more

Benthic Terrain Modeler is once again being updated, and in its latest release we include two possible measures for rugosity: VRM and the surface area to planar area ratio provided both in previous releases of BTM and in Jenness' tools. BTM is available freely for download, let us know if you'd like to see more. The tool is open source and available on Github, where we'd be happy to get suggestions for future development.    ... View more

I did get Spyder to work, and my guess is that one of the many pathing "gotchas" is to blame. Could you try searching your disk for any other instances of python.exe, and see if others show up beside the version you've installed for ArcGIS? It's not uncommon for a few instances to be installed side-by-side, and in that case it takes some delicate work to insure that Spyder (and its dependencies like PyQt4) all end up being installed into the same Python instance. I'm happy to keep plugging away with you to get this working. ... View more

Generally, you want to keep raster data in a format appropriate for it, as the representation will increase significantly in size in a textual format like CSV, and its best to perform your analysis or questions directly against the raster dataset. If you know what you're doing and you do want the raw values, there's a few ways to get them. Perhaps the simplest is to save out the data as an ASCII file -- that will give you a plain-text encoding of the data, see this Wikipedia article for a mapping between the cell values and their positions within the output text file. ... View more

I'd start by trying Topo to Raster with the optional Extent parameter set to a limited area within your full dataset, it won't try to interpolate contours outside the extents you've set. Doing that multiple times over different pieces of your full set should work. Similarly, you could try using something like the Dice tool to break up your contours into smaller areas, and run the conversion step on each of those pieces, just watch out for edge effects (where the interpolation tries to match to the new artifical vector boundary). If neither of those work, I'd think about thinning the input dataset (removing vertices that are close to their neighbors and don't vary much) and see if you can effectively reduce the point volume without compromising the surface structure. cheers, Shaun ... View more

I'd first check if the services you're interested in are covered in the AGO SLA, but if not, you might want to try your question in the ArcGIS Online forum instead where there's likely to me more people who are informed on AGO, this forum is for the Portal for ArcGIS server extension. ... View more

The GRID format is a collection of files in a directory, not just the single .adf file, so with any tools you use, you want to point them at that directory, not a specific component file within it. If you're in ArcMap and can open the files successfully, you can export them by right clicking on the layer and selecting Data > Export Data. Choose a file format of your choice, such as GeoTIFF for the export. You can also use third party tools, such as GDAL, to translate the GRID files into another format. cheers, Shaun ... View more

Samuel, The spyder.bat file just includes a reference to "python", without the full path to the executable. You can fix it by either adding the path to your Python installation to your system PATH variable (see this post), or by changing the spyder.bat file to include the full location of python.exe, something like C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2 . ... View more