A Complete Beginner's Guide to ArcGIS Desktop (Part 2)

all right now let's move on to the next part how to add a base map well arcmap has quite a number of base maps included in the program now to access that you can simply go to file and add data and you can go to add base map over here and from here you can actually select different types of base map now we have the imagery we have the imagery with labels streets topographic map national geographic map the terrain with labels the openstreetmap so depending on your choice just make sure that you have a functioning internet connection and you'll be able to quite simply add the base map to your working interface now for this example i'm going to add this open straight map so let's see how it would look when i add this one now finally you get to see that we are working in some area which corresponds to this city of cardiff of uk and now you can see that how i have demarcated my area of interest actually this demarcation was done just for the purpose of this tutorial so there is no specific reason why i sort of segmented these two parts out it's just basically to explain these concepts to you guys let me go ahead and maybe change the color of this yeah so it stands out just a bit and if i zoom this one out you can see that it's located in this part of of uk one more quick tip if you wanted to zoom to the extent of your of your layer you can simply right click on the layer and go to zoom to layer and that will sort of take care of all the zooming in to perfectly fit to the extents of your layers and since we're talking about the base map let's say if you think that your base map is a bit too sharp in terms of its colors and if you would like to increase the transparency of your base map you can simply go over here right click to properties and you can go to display and over here you can increase the transparency percentage let's say if i were to put about 35 you will see that the transparency will increase which will sort of give a bit more highlight to our existing layers because there's too many things going on in the background so now if you wanted to see certain information from the base map itself you can see that there's a river running down from here which is the river tuff and if i were to activate my river layers you can see that it actually gets placed perfectly on top of this this river and well let me go ahead and activate this reverse dissolve uh this reverse shape file yeah same for river eli as well as you can see over here if i activate and deactivate you can see that the source which i downloaded the data from has done a good job in terms of demarcating the extent of the river in this case all right now since i have the base map on i would also like to take this opportunity to explain to you guys how we can split a polygon my intention is actually let's say to split one of these polygons based on this railway track that you can see over here [Music] not sure if that's very apparent to you guys or not yeah it's this one let's say i wanted to split one of these polygons along this line now let's see how we can do that so for that i'm going to actually not use this original region of interest one or two i'm going to use one of those let's say i'm going to use this roi union polygon so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get rid of the fill color but i'm going to retain the the outline let's say that i keep my outline in blue color and i'm going to increase the thickness of the line just a bit yeah and let's say that i would like to split this polygon based on the extent of this railway track now something to keep in mind is that if you are splitting the polygon that means you are going to do some edits to that particular layer so you cannot right now the layer is sort of in a frozen mod where you cannot do any edits to it so if in case you would like to do some edits that means you have to actually convert this layers status from being non-editable to editable mode so to activate the editable mod of that particular layer you can right click on the layer and go to edit features and select start editing and as you can see over here that will automatically open up this editor toolbar now you can either return it somewhere over here or you can just try to snap it someplace right over here and now the layer is actually in in an editable mode so let's say if you wanted to split the polygon well right now you can see that there are one two three different polygons so i'm going to deselect everything and if you wanted to split a polygon you can use this tool which is this cut polygons tool right over here and it says that there is no selection that's because if you wanted to use that cut polygon features you actually first have to specify which attribute you would like to do the edit for so i'm going to open up the attributes table again and i would like to select this particular polygon attribute and after that i can go to this cut polygons tool and now i can sort of specify the line through which i would like to make the cut simply by drawing on top of this rail line over here well in this case it's just a hypothetical scenario but in your specific cases there could be a number of reasons why you might need to split a polygon into two pieces but if you can understand actually how the tool works in this example then i'm sure that you'll be able to use that for your own specific case as well you don't really need to finish the cut exactly on top of this line you can actually extend it to wherever you want but the cut will apply only to the extent of that particular selected polygon so let's say i select somewhere over here and now you can see that suddenly the number of attributes increased from three to four so which means if i select this part now it's actually a separate attribute or a separate polygon by itself and these two were already there before and this is the new polygon which actually got cut by this particular line as you can see over here now if you deselect everything you will see that your new roi union shape file has now been cut into one two three four zones instead of just the three zones which is how it was before and let's say if you would if you wanted to further cut this polygon into two parts all i have to do is just select the corresponding polygon that's not that one it's actually the first one just like this and again i can go to this cut polygons tool and demarcate how however i want to actually make the cut just like this yeah now you can see that the number of attributes increased from four to five which corresponds to these two cuts that we did over here all right so i guess you guys understood how to actually cut a polygon well once you're done with your edits just keep in mind that still this is in the editable mode you don't want to leave a layer in editable mode because there's a good chance that by mistake you might do some edits for example if i were to select this particular piece of polygon and if i happen to drag my mouse over it you can see that it actually moves to somewhere else and this kind of things can happen when your layer is in editable mode so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go and undo that move first and after that i'm going to go to this editor toolbar over here and i'm going to say stop editing and it'll actually prompt saying that asking whether i want to save my edits and i will say yes and now the layer has been moved from being editable to non-editable now even if i select anything on top of this you can see that it actually doesn't get dragged into different places just like how it was before because now it's converted into a non-editable layer all right now my next objective is actually to teach you guys how to calculate basic geometrical properties for given shape files now by geometrical properties what i mean is things like calculating areas and things like lengths of course areas for polygons and lengths for polylines and we will see how we can do those calculations for example let's say i did this cut i would like to know how much is the area of this particular piece of polygon and you can calculate those kind of information very easily using this arcmap software so we'll see how we can do that all right one thing to keep in mind when calculating areas is that all of these geospatial information are represented in a specific spatial reference system or coordinate system now if you would like to check you the coordinate system of your entire data frame you can go to these layers and select properties and over here you can see what is your coordinate system now in this case the coordinate system is actually a geographic coordinate system and under world it's the wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system now if you wanted to calculate an area it's always wise to actually convert the existing coordinate system into a projected coordinate system because then you can work with units such as meters or kilometers depending on your preference now for example if i wanted to calculate the area the standard method of calculating the area would be simply by adding a separate column into the attributes table of that particular layer for example let's say if i wanted to calculate the area of this region of interest one you can see that when i go to attributes table we don't have anything much over here so first what i would do is i would make space i would make some space to calculate the area by adding a new field and i'm going to name that field as area and over here the data type if you leave it to be short or long integers there won't be any decimal points but if you would like to make the calculation a bit more precise you can actually go with either float or double and after that you can let's say click ok and you can automatically calculate area simply by selecting this particular column and by going to this calculate geometry option and you can click yes and you can see that over here this area and parameter options actually disabled by default and you can see the coordinate system is actually wgs1984 so before calculating the area i will have to actually change the projection of my layer from being a geographic coordinate system into a projected coordinate system well now you might be thinking how to actually identify the corresponding projected coordinate system which would be relevant for this particular area of the world now we are talking about this cardiff city of uk so what i would recommend is to actually find the corresponding utm zone which can be used for your area of interest and a quick trick that i do actually to find the corresponding utm zone is well there are so many other references if you just google it you will be able to very easily find the corresponding utm zone as well but if you are using a tool like google earth you can very clearly get an idea of your utm zone simply by simply by using google earth as well so i'm just going to show you guys that how i would normally do that so you can just go ahead and open up google earth and i will zoom into my area of interest which is actually in cardiff over here and on the lower right corner by default you will see that when i move my mouse cursor around the coordinates actually change now these coordinates are in lat long so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to tools and go to options and from here i'm going to select universal transverse mercator the utm and click apply and ok and now when i move my mouse point over here it'll actually show me that my utm zone is 30 and of course we are in north so my corresponding utm zone will be 30 north so what i would do is i will go to this search tool and i type reproject and what i need is actually this first tool of course in the toolbox this is where it's located at under data management tools projections and transformations project you can simply open open that up from here so i'm going to project this region of interest from being wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system which is the input coordinate system as you can see over here and the output coordinate system i'm going to select from here well you can either navigate to the place if you know exactly where it is or if not you can actually type some keyword from here you can go to projected coordinate systems utm wgs 1984 and we are talking about the northern hemisphere and my utm zone is utm zone 30 and click ok and after that i can specify the path as well i'm going to say region of interest utm 30 north well this one is roi 1 and then we can click ok and you can see that now the the reprojection is done already and for some reason it didn't actually get added into my working space over here but right from here you can see that we have that shape file over here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just drag it and drop it on top of this and the way to check whether it got transformed in terms of its projection is simply by going to properties and over here in the source you can see that now the coordinate system is actually a projected coordinate system which is the utm zone 30 and before it was yeah wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system so now you know that this actually got reprojected according to our specified projected coordinate system and now if i wanted to calculate the area all i have to do is go to attributes table and over here we still have that empty column that we created i will right click on it go to calculate geometry click yes and now you can see that if i select the area we have so many different options to actually calculate the area we can calculate the area in square meters or we can calculate in square kilometers square feet hectares or in acres depending on your preference i would prefer to have have this one in square kilometers so what i can now do is just click ok and it'll automatically calculate the area for me it's about 42.22 square kilometers let's say if you wanted to calculate the perimeter all you have to do is first again go and create some space for that which means by which means we will have to add a new column and i'm going to just give a short name parameter and let's say this time i'm going to use short integer and click ok and now i will go over here right click and go to calculate geometry and from here i will have to select the property which is the perimeter and i would like to calculate the perimeter in let's say yeah meters so if i click ok you can see that now it calculates the perimeter for me it's 31 411 meters which is about 31.4 kilometers so that's how you can actually use this calculate geometry option in order to calculate the geometrical properties of each of the items now similarly if you wanted to calculate let's say the lengths of one of these rivers let me deactivate this let's see if i wanted to calculate the length of this piece of line well there was another way of doing it as i explained to you guys you can use this measure tool but as you can imagine it's actually going to be very tedious especially when you're working with meandering reverse like this because you will have to measure very accurately for example let me just go ahead and try to do that in meters you can see that it's actually very tedious task to draw on top of this perfectly just to make sure that i get all the curves but i'm going to continue to do it just so that when i when i calculate it using the calculator geometry option we can sort of have a comparison whether we calculated it correctly or not so from here you can see that the length of this line is going to add up to something like 13293 meters which is about 13.2 kilometers so i'm going to remove this one and now let's yeah you guys just keep in mind that the length of this river according to our measuring tool was about 13.2 kilometers so we'll check first the coordinate reference system which is in wgs1984 so of course we need to project that [Music] so i'm going to take this reverse dissolve and my output coordinate system is going to be projected well sorry utm wgs 1984 northern hemisphere and going to be 30. i'm going to change the path to be reverse utm zone 30 not all right and click ok yeah even though it didn't get added to the working space automatically you can see from here that we have a new shapefile called reverse utm30 not and we have that right over here if i deselect this and maybe increase the length increase the width of the of the line and now if i check the attributes table you see that we don't have anything much over here except for the shape type and the name and the field id so i'm going to create a new field called length and i'm going to keep it to be of type double and when you go to this calculate geometry option now you will see that you won't get things like area because it doesn't actually make sense to calculate the area of a line but instead it automatically gives you these options which are the x coordinate of this starting point the ending point the midpoints which actually quite useful information isn't it so i'm going to directly use length from here and calculate the length in meters and click ok and now you can see that the river which we measured by hand we got something about 13.2 kilometers which converts into something like 13 200 meters but over here you can see that the actual length is 13 458.4 meters very precise and very accurate and the other viewer you can see that it's about 34 two 337.647121 meters well similarly let's say if you wanted to calculate the midpoints of each of these rivers i'm going to create two more fields i'm going to name this one as x which is going to be of type double and i'm going to calculate well i think it would be good to mention x underscore midpoint to do that maybe i would like to first get rid of this column so all you have to do to delete a column is just right click over here and select delete field and click yes and one more interesting thing and a bit of a strange thing in arcmap is that to create new fields or to use the geometry calculator you don't really have to activate the editing mode you can do all of these things while the while the layer is actually in the non-editable mode so that's something interesting so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to add field and create a heading called x midpoint put this to be of type double and i'm going to specify another point called y midpoint and put the type to be double as well and from here i'm going to directly use the calculate geometry to calculate the x coordinate of the midpoint from here which is going to be in meters because the unit which corresponds to this particular coordinate system is meters so i will say yes and that calculates the x coordinates of the midpoint of each of these rivers and let's see if i wanted to calculate the y coordinates calculate geometry and we go to y coordinate of the midpoint and i'm going to return the units in meters and so these are the x and y coordinates which corresponds to this river eli i reckon it should be somewhere over somewhere over here should be somewhere over here and when it comes to the midpoint of river tuff it should be well just keep in mind that this is actually calculating only the midpoint based on this particular stretch but i'm sure that the river top will extend even further beyond up more than this especially when considering the headquarters but for some reason i have only this particular stretch of river tuff and the midpoint of that particular polyline is should be somewhere over here and these are the coordinates which correspond to that all right let's go back to this banks layer and let's say for example if i want if i would like to calculate the x and y coordinates of this banks layer for each bank the x and y coordinates of each bank but you would like to do it in decimal degrees rather than doing it in in meters in that case you don't really have to project this into a projected coordinate system you can work with the existing wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system so the way to calculate the x and y coordinates would be again it's going to be the same method that we used just that we have to create two empty columns to allow some spacing for that so i'm going to add a field called x coordinate which is going to be a double and you can see that we have this empty well it gets filled up with zeros but i think we can consider that to be an empty valley why coordinate again a double [Music] and all you have to do is first select and go to calculate geometry and now over here you can see that just because my coordinate system is in wgs 1994 geographic coordinate system my flexibility in terms of the units is actually just limited to decimal degrees and that's how it is and i'm going to select the x coordinate and now you can see that we get the x coordinate of each of these banks and similarly i'm going to calculate the geometry and in this case it's going to be the y coordinate yeah now you can see that for example if i select the first row and if i kind of double click that it will zoom in to that particular point and this is that bank the x x y coordinates in terms of decimal degrees is actually this particular value as you can see right over here quite interesting isn't it well before we move on to the next part i would also like to talk about the the coordinate reference system of the existing data frame and actually there are two things the coordinate reference system of each individual layer and the coordinate reference system of this particular data frame which is basically your working space i would like to put it like that and the coordinate reference system of that is actually embedded in this layers so i'm going to go to these layers and if i go to properties you can see that my data frames coordinate reference system is actually still in geographic coordinate reference system let's see if you would like to put that into the same coordinate reference system which was utm zone 30 north which is this one and if i apply you can see that the map will also change just a bit like this and you can see that now we get something like a proper top weave because previously when we used the geographic corner reference system we sort of got a stretched out weave so this is how the map looks when we use this udm zone 30 coordinate reference system all right so i guess you guys got some idea about switching between different coordinate reference systems and how to actually use the attributes table to calculate the different geometrical properties of your attributes or your different shape files in this case so in the next part i'm going to teach you guys how to create your own shape files by means of digitizing all right so digitizing is something very similar to tracing now let's say if you were to trace some information from a map what you would do is you will place that map which contains the original information on the bottom and you will place your tracing paper on the top and you will sort of draw on top of that isn't it and over here we are going to do the exact same procedure but the map that we place on the bottom would be our base map itself over here and using the digitizing tools we are going to actually trace on top of let's say different elements to create our own shape files it could be either polylines polygons or even points depending on your preference so to get started i'm actually going to increase will decrease the transparency back to zero so that the items would be a bit more apparent and let's say to get started i would like to digitize this water body that you can see over here that means i'm going to create my own shape file which corresponds to the boundaries of this particular water body that you can see so in order to do this first what you need to do is you have to create a new shape file by simply going to the folder of your interest you can do that by navigating to the place where you would like to store your shape file in and you can right click on that folder and go to new and now what we are going to do is we are going to create a new shape file and i'm going to give the same name that you can see over here which is the butte is dock [Music] and it is essential to specify what type of a feature type that we are going to actually create over here in this case it's going to be a polygon and again quite essential that you specify the corresponding coordinate reference system well in this case let's say if i were to follow the projected coordinate system i would go to utm wgs 1984 northern hemisphere and go to 30 over here and these are basically the things that we need to specify after that you can click ok after that you will see that this empty layer gets added into this layers panel now if you open the attributes table you will see that it's actually completely an empty attributes table so now what we are going to do is we are going to add the attributes to that so i will go to edit features and i'm going to start editing this particular layer i will click continue and after that you need to make sure that your editor toolbar is active in case for some reason if it's nowhere to be found over here you can either right click over here and you can activate this edited tool like this or you can simply follow the standard method which is by going to customize toolbars and from here you can select or activate this edit toolbar and once you're in the editing mode when you select this create features button it will open up this beauty stock layer which you wanted to digitize or which you wanted to create you can simply click on it once and you can create and you can have a look at the available construction tools over here i do not really want a perfect rectangle or a circle i would like to have a polygon because i have some edges like this so i would like to first click on this polygon tool and after that you can actually use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and zoom out according to your preference and after that you can start digitizing basically digitizing means we are adding these vertices in a way that we create a complete polygon well you can zoom in according to your preference like this and you can actually take your time to make sure that you do this digitizing quite accurately but in this case i'm just going to speed it up just a bit because i'm doing it just for the purposes of demonstrating this to you guys well one of the issues in working with the base map is that it takes quite some time to actually load whenever you zoom in or zoom out i assume that this also depends on your how fast your internet connection is so after you finish everything you can actually double click to complete your polygon just like this and now you can see that we have created one polygon and if you go to this view each dock and open the attributes table you will see that we have one attribute which is this particular polygon that we see right over here now to conclude digitizing all you have to do is go to editor and save edits which means actually you're going to save your edits and you can basically stop editing and now you have a brand new shape file which is called butte is doc even if you refresh this you will see that we have that this new shape file over here inside this shape files folder but if you go to the attributes table you will see that we don't really have the name beauty stock appearing in this attributes table uh this is something you can add manually maybe you can create a new field called name and this time you have to make sure that you are going to go with text and now you can see that if you try to name if you try to type the name view each doc you can see that nothing happens because we save the edits of this layer even though we are able to add empty columns into this attributes table we are not actually able to edit them just yet because we are not in the editing mode so we have to go and turn this layer into editable mode and after that you will see when you double click over here you will get the cursor after you enter the thing you can simply go and stop editing at the same time it will ask you to save it and now let's say if you deactivate your base map and if you want to add this label i will select the name as you can remember because my name of the butte is doc is actually under this name column heading and now you can see that it appears as a separate shape file along with its label just like this i'm going to activate reactivate this base map quite useful isn't it now you don't actually have to restrict yourself just for just one polygon let's see if you would like to create multiple polygons of different building footprints let's say something like this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to again create a new shape file called buildings and that's also going to be polygon the coordinate system is going to be the same utm zone 30 click ok and we again follow the standard procedure of changing a layer from being non-editable to editable by start editing over here and then we create we go to create features and we click on these buildings over here and we're going to click on polygon so what i'm going to do is i'm going to maybe zoom in just a little bit well after selecting polygons from these construction tools you can actually start digitizing just like how you did it before just like this once you're done you can actually double click just to complete the the polygon and each time when you start a new polygon it will be added as a new attribute to the attributes table if i were to maybe let's say keep this one open like this well for some reason let's see if you would like to maybe get rid of the fill color while digitizing and if you would like to maybe have a different color for the outline you can do that too just like this and once you're done you can go to editor tool and select stop editing and you get the option to actually save your edits now if you do have specific names for the buildings you can add that over here as well for example let's say i will create a new column called name and put the type to be text [Music] and after that i have to make sure that i flip this back to editing mode which will allow me to maybe type some sort of text over here you can even copy and paste the same thing over here just like this after that you can again go back and save your edits and if you're done with everything you can just stop editing just like this which means we have a new shape file called buildings over here as well as you can see we can turn that and turn that on and off and similar to what you learned just a few minutes ago if you wanted to calculate let's see the areas of each of these different building footprints you can do that quite comfortably from here we will create a new column called area and put the put the type to be in double [Music] and we can go back to calculate geometry and this time i'm going to keep the units in square meters yeah you can see that it gets appeared over here in case if you would like to see maybe less decimal points you can go to right click over here and you can go to properties and from here let's go to numeric and you can reduce the number of decimal points to be let's say just one decimal point click ok and apply and now you can see that we just get a bit of a clear view of different areas of of these different building footprints which we digitized by ourselves all right before we wrap up i would like to also digitize maybe one line feature let's see just for the demonstration purposes i would like to digitize this rod starting from here all the way up to here so all i have to do is open my arc catalog make sure i'm in the correct folder create a new shape file i'm going to name this one as rod in this case i'm going to select polyline select the corresponding coordinate reference system and after that well you can change the styling from here itself before you even start digitizing well let's say i'm going to select this expressway inbuilt symbol rather than making my own symbols so i'm going to click ok and after that i will flip this to b on the editing mode [Music] and we go back to create features from here and select rod and this time my construction tool is actually going to be a line so i'm going to select that and after that i will basically digitize on top of this this rod just like this yeah let's say that's just one rod and maybe if i wanted to create another piece let's say from here up to here up to this junction yeah now you can see that if i open the attributes table i have two features two line polyline features one is this rod and the other one is this rod if i turn off the base map you can see the polyline quite uh quite clearly over here as well so i'm not going to do that for point because the workflow is exactly the same just that on the type of the shape you have to select point instead of polyline or polygon and then you will be good to go you can pinpoint the things that you want and afterwards you can actually create new columns to add any specific details that you would like to add regarding those points as well so i'm going to stop editing this and by the way i would like to remind to you guys that all those new shape files which we created by ourself are also added over here you can see the rod shape file which we had is actually over here because we created those shape files inside this shapefiles folder so everything will get added over here so in case if you would like to pass all of this to somebody else that can be done quite easily all right before we wrap up the part which corresponds to working with vector data i would also like to show you guys how to export shape files into other formats as well let's say i have this roi union shapefile which i created over here now for example if you wanted to export this into a different location you can simply go to data and export data and from here you can select the new location now for example if i wanted to create [Music] a new folder within these shape files i'm going to create let's say a folder called test and i open that and after that you can save the file type as shapefile and from here i'm going to name this one as roi union.shp and i can simply export that and it's asking me whether i want to add that exported data into the map as a layer or not in this case i'm just going to say no because i just wanted to show you guys how we can export this layers that we have over here as shape files and if i navigate back to that corresponding folder you can see that we have this folder called test and inside that we have the roi union shapefile now let's say if you wanted to export this into kmz format which you can weave using google earth you can again come to the search panel and you can search for layer to kml and from here you can select this layer to kml tool and from here you can actually add any layer that you have and [Music] i'm going to add this one to again this test folder i will name this one as roi union and you can see that the extension actually got automatically changed to dot kmz that's the file extension that we need as well and i'm going to just click ok and now if i navigate back to the place where i have exported that file into you can see that over here i have this kmz file which is having this icon of google earth so of course if you have installed google earth all you have to do is just simply double click over here and that will open up that particular shape file as a layer in google earth itself pretty interesting isn't it just like this you can transfer any kind of vector data into google earth points lines polygons doesn't really matter and if you actually had some meaningful information inside this attributes table you can weave that as well from here and if you activate your panel over here you can see we have the now the kmz file called roi union and if you expand that you will be able to see the different different polygon features so this is just like viewing the attributes table in arcmap but over here we have the option to sort of turn on and off not just the entire layer but the different attributes of the layer as well which is quite quite interesting actually so that was how to export vector layers from arcmap into programs like google earth by converting the format from being s3 shape file to kmz right guys now in the next part i'm going to move on to working with rust data you

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Keywords: ArcGIS Desktop tutorial, ArcGIS tutorial, a complete beginner's guide, remote sensing and GIS, arcgis tutorial, arcgis tutorial for beginners, arcgis map tutorial, arcgis online, arcgis pro tutorial, arcgis desktop vs arcgis pro, GIS, gis tutorial for beginners, remote sensing technology, remote sensing applications, introduction to gis using arcgis, introduction to arcgis, introduction to arcgis for beginner, ArcGIS Basic Tools for Beginners, introduction to arcgis 10

Id: t7ZnT5NgqlM

Length: 44min 9sec (2649 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020