How to perform an analysis with these criteria

[NoayavRee]

Hello, 

I'm quite new to ArcGis and everything that comes along with it and struggle with an assignment that I have. It is about finding suitable excavation points for which I have gotten several different types of maps to combine and analyse. For most of the requirements I have found the solution already, however, I'm not really sure what type of data handling/operation to use to find the solution to the following criteria:

- Excavation points are not allowed in areas of forest with a minimum of 10ha adjacent to a specific habitat. A shape file is provided to analyse this. 

I thought this should be handled by processing by neighbourhood and buffering, but I'm not sure

- Another criteria is that the thickness of sandlayer needs to be at least 5m. I have been given sampling sites and a table with the findings belonging to these sites 

The only thing I could think of was processing by attribute and then joins and relates, but that also seems like the wrong thing to do. 

Perhaps there is anyone that can give me a tip or hint? Or maybe some place where I can find more info on these types of analysis?

Kind Regards

[JohannesLindner]

It's hard to give specific tips without knowing your data, but here are some general ones:

Sand layer thickness

• Join the sampling results to the sites. The goal here is to have a point layer with a sand thickness attribute.
• Now convert this point layer into a polygon layer of areas with thickness >= 5m
  • Either Create Thiessen Polygons, then select and delete all polygons where thickness < 5m
  • or interpolate a raster of sand thickness with (for example) IDW, use the Raster Calculator to create a raster where all cells with sand thickness >= 5m get the same value and all other cells are null, then convert the Raster to Polygon 
• These polygons are suitable according to the requirement.

Neighboring a specific habitat

• Create a layer of forests with an area > 10 hectares
• Select the habitat(s)
• Select Layer By Location, using the habitat layer as selecting features and a relationship of "Intersects", "Within Distance", or "Boundary Touches", depending on your data. Check "Invert Spatial Relationship".
• The selected forest polygons are suitable according to the requirement.

[NoayavRee]

Thank you so much!