TABLE OF CONTENTS
This guide was created by the staff of the GIS/Data Center at Rice University and is to be used for individual educational purposes only. The steps outlined in this guide require access to ArcGIS Pro software and data that is available both online and at Fondren Library. The following text styles are used throughout the guide: Explanatory text appears in a regular font.
Folder and file names are in italics. Names of Programs, Windows, Panes, Views, or Buttons are Capitalized. 'Names of windows or entry fields are in single quotation marks.' "Text to be typed appears in double quotation marks."
The following step-by-step instructions and screenshots are based on the Windows 10 operating system with the Windows Classic desktop theme and ArcGIS Pro 2.1.3 software. If your personal system configuration varies, you may experience minor differences from the instructions and screenshots. |
This tutorial uses data from Utah's Zion National Park, which contains such geologic wonders as red and tan sandstone rocks, steep cliffs, and multitudes of canyons. You will use the editing environment in ArcMap to create and modify spatial features to represent various natural and human-made phenomena in the park. After completing these exercises, you are able to create different types of new features, including points, lines, and polygons; assign attribute values; edit shapes; and build and use feature templates. You will also become familiar with many of the tools and parts of the user interface available to you when editing.
Before beginning the tutorial, you will copy all of the required tutorial data onto your Desktop.
In this exercise, you will use an aerial photograph to create a new point feature representing a park ranger station in Zion National Park. Once the feature is created, you will then add attribute values to the point. You are introduced to the Editor toolbar, the Create Features pane, and the Attributes pane, which are the main elements of the ArcGIS Pro user interface when editing.
To start this exercise, you first need to zoom the map to your area of interest. A spatial bookmark, which is similar to a bookmark in a Web browser, is a way to save frequently used locations on your map so you can easily access them. A bookmark has been created for you containing the map extent in which you will be working.
The ‘Create Features’ pane will open to the right of the Map Display.
4. In the ‘Create Features’ pane, click the Ranger stations point feature template
This sets up the editing environment so that you will be creating new point features in the Ranger stations layer.
These feature templates were created for you and saved in the tutorial map document. In a later tutorial exercise, you will create feature templates yourself and modify their properties.
5. Underneath the Ranger_Stations features template, make sure that the Point tool is selected.
6. Using the aerial imagery as your guide, click once on the visitor center building in the center of the display to place a point directly over the visitor center, as shown below.
Since you are creating points, clicking the map once adds the feature. If you were drawing lines or polygons, however, you would need to use more than one click so you could create segments in between vertices. Notice that the center of the symbol is highlighted with a solid, cyan color (light, bright blue). By default, as soon as you create new features when editing, they are selected. This allows you to easily identify the new feature and add attribute values to it.
7. On the Edit toolbar, click the Attributes button.
Using the ‘Attributes’ pane is a quick way of updating the attribute values of one or more selected features when you are editing. The top of the pane shows a hierarchy of the name of the layer and, underneath it, an identifier for the individual feature from that layer. The bottom of the pane shows the field (a column in a table) names and the attribute values (a row in a table) for the feature.
8. For the ‘Location’ attribute value, click the blank box which is currently blank or <Null>.
9. Type “Visitor Center” and press Enter.
This action stores the attribute values for that feature. Notice that the entry for the feature on the top of the pane is no longer a generic number but has been replaced with the more descriptive Visitor Center, as shown below.
10. Close the Attributes pane.
You have now completed the first exercise and created a new point feature. In the next exercises, you will learn how to create new lines and polygons.
11. On the Edit toolbar, in the Manage Edits group, click the Save button.
12. To stop creating new features, close the Create Features pane and click the Explore button on the Map toolbar in the Navigate group.
In the first exercise, you digitized a point over an aerial photograph; in this one, you will trace over the image to create a new line representing a road.
Because part of the road has already been created, you should use snapping to help ensure the new road feature connects to the existing roads. When snapping is turned on, your pointer will jump, or snap to, edges, vertices, and other geometric elements when it is near them. This enables you to position a feature easily in relation to the locations of other features. All the settings you need to work with snapping are located on the Snapping drop-down menu in the Edit toolbar.
You are now ready to begin digitizing the new road.
You digitize, or sketch, a new line or polygon by defining the feature's shape. You see a preview with the actual symbology used for that feature, with vertices symbolized as green and red boxes.
4. Using the aerial photo as a guide, digitize the new line by clicking the map each place you want to add a vertex.
5. Once you have digitized the new line, snap to the end of the existing Roads feature and click to place a vertex there.
6. Press the F2 key, which finishes the sketch to turn your shape into an actual feature in the geodatabase. You can finish a sketch in one of several ways: pressing F2, double-clicking, or using the right-click shortcut menu or the pop-up Feature Construction toolbar.
In this exercise, you learned how to set up snapping and use it to help you digitize a new road that connects to existing roads.
The Template Properties dialog box allows you to review and change the template settings. For example, you can rename a template, provide a description, set the default construction tool, and specify the attribute values that should be assigned to new features created with this template.
In the first exercises, you used feature templates that had their properties already set for you. Now, you are going to set the properties of a feature template for a polygon layer representing private landownership. Before you create features, you should review a template's properties to ensure they are set appropriately.
This ensures that the Polygon tool activates each time you choose the Tracts template.
This sets Private as the default attribute value for that field for all new features created with this template.
When you rest your pointer on the template, you see the text you entered for the description.
You are now ready to create features using the properties specified in this feature template.
Since you have been exposed to the basic concepts and user interface elements of editing and creating features, you are now ready to learn advanced feature creation techniques. You will use several different methods to construct the polygon tract boundaries, including snapping, entering measurements, and drawing rectangles. You also will use keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus to improve productivity while creating features.
When Zion National Park became a protected area in the early 1900s, multiple owners held the land that became the park. Although Zion is mostly United States federal government land now, there are some areas within the park that are still owned privately. In this exercise, you will create some boundary lines representing the privately held features.
Choosing a template sets up the editing environment for the settings in that template. This action sets the target layer in which your new features will be stored, activates a feature construction tool at the bottom of the ‘Create Features’ window, and prepares to assign the default attributes to the new feature. Since the layer's template is set up so the Polygon tool is the default feature construction tool, the Polygon tool becomes active.
By default, the Line and Polygon tools create straight segments between the vertices you click. These tools also have additional ways to define a feature's shape, such as creating curved lines or tracing existing features. These are known as construction methods and are located on the Editor toolbar.
This activates the Polygon construction tool , which you set as the default tool using the Template Properties. Since the tracts share an edge with the park boundary and an adjacent tract, you can use them to help you construct the shape of the polygon.
With the Line construction method, a vertex is placed each time you click, with the segments between vertices being straight lines.
You now have created two vertices with a straight line connecting them to define the eastern boundary of this tract.
This will lock your next point to be on the bottom edge of the existing tract.
The buttons to choose a segment construction method on the Feature Construction toolbar are also found on the Editor toolbar, but it is often easier to access them on the Feature Construction toolbar since it is closer to your pointer. If you click a segment construction method on the Feature Construction toolbar, it then becomes active on the Editor toolbar, and vice versa. Two of the most common segment construction methods, Straight Segment and Endpoint Arc Segment, are located directly on the toolbar, but there is a palette to the right of these buttons containing additional methods.
To enter the final measurement for the corner, you need to type a specific coordinate.
Absolute XY allows you to type an exact x,y coordinate for the next vertex. By default, the values you enter are in map units, which are meters for this map. If you want to enter values in decimal degrees or other formats, you can click the arrow to change the input boxes.
Tip: If you make a mistake and want to cancel out of a sketch constraint, which is a command that limits the placement of the next vertex, you can press the ESC key. Once a vertex is added, you can delete it by pressing the Undo button on either the Feature Construction toolbar or the Standard toolbar.
You have created the first polygon lot feature. You could also use the F2 key, double-click the map, or right-click to finish the sketch.
Notice that the attribute value for the Ownership field is Private, which is the default value you set in the template's properties.
Sometimes you need to create rectangular polygons. Rather than clicking each vertex individually as you have been doing, you can use the Rectangle construction tool. The first click with the Rectangle tool creates the first vertex, then the second click establishes the "angle" of the rectangle, and the final click adds the remaining corner vertices. In addition, the Rectangle tool allows you to enter x,y coordinates for the vertices, as well as directions and lengths for the sides.
This establishes the angle for the rectangle. As you move your pointer around the map, you see a rectangle preview of the feature. By default, angles are entered in degrees using the polar system, which is measured counterclockwise from the positive x-axis. You can specify a different direction measuring system or unit on the Editing Options dialog box > Units tab.
You now need to create one more polygon to fill in the space between these two polygons. You could snap to every vertex, but an easier way is to use the Auto-Complete Polygon tool, which uses the geometry of existing polygons to create new adjacent polygons that do not overlap or have gaps.
When using the Auto-Complete Polygon tool, ArcMap automatically uses the shapes of the surrounding polygons in that layer to create the geometry for the new polygon.
The new features have been created with the default attribute values (Private) specified in the template. If you wanted to add other information, such as ID numbers, you would select the features and type the values into the ‘Attributes’ window.
Sometimes you may want to create features of a certain type in an existing layer, but the layer is not set up to capture those features. For example, you want to add features to a roads layer to represent an unpaved road, but you currently only have categories in your data for freeway, major highway, and local road. Through a wizard, you can define everything about the unpaved road category at one time—making it easy to prepare your data to display and store the new types of features. ArcGIS Pro automatically adds a symbol for the new category, any required geodatabase information (such as subtype value or coded domain value) for that layer, and a feature template to use when creating an unpaved road. The wizard saves you from having to stop your work to open multiple dialog boxes to set up the data on your own.
The park contains several areas of natural, cultural, or historical significance that are designated for research and education purposes only and are not open for public recreational use. In this exercise, you will define a new category of features to represent buffer regions around areas in the park that have been proposed for research-only use. This new category can show the area where travel is not recommended but is not prohibited.
The Research areas layer is symbolized by unique values, so the Define New Feature Type wizard allows you to define the symbol and create a feature template containing the default attributes for the new buffer zones category. You will use an existing feature to create the new buffer around it in a later exercise.
The ‘New Template’ window opens.
This will automatically populate the Name field of every feature you create with this template with “Buffer zones”
A new feature template has been created.
Now that you have added a feature template for the new type, you are ready to start creating features.
You are provided with a polygon feature showing one of these research-only locations in the park and will use it to create another feature representing a buffer zone around it. You will select the original research-only polygon and use the Buffer command on the Edit menu to create the new feature.
When you click the Buffer command, a dialog box opens allowing you to specify a feature template and buffer distance. Like other measurements when editing, the buffer distance is specified in map units, but you can also give the value in other units by specifying a distance units abbreviation with the value that you enter.
Editing commands that create new features automatically from existing features, such as Buffer, require you to choose the feature template to use when creating the new feature. Similar to clicking a feature template in the Create Features window, choosing a template on these dialog boxes defines the layer where a feature will be stored and the default attributes for the new feature. A buffer feature can be created as either a line or a polygon, so you could see both line and polygon templates listed but no templates for any other types of features.
The map zooms to the Goose Creek area of the park. The polygons depict research-only areas.
This makes it easier for you to see and select the correct features.
This will open up the Modify Features window, which has a list of all the available tools.
The Select Feature Template window shows only templates that are valid output types for the particular command rather than all the templates listed on the Create Features window. In the case of Buffer, polygon and line templates would be listed, if available, since both these geometry types can store the new buffer feature. On the other hand, when using a command, such as Copy Parallel, that creates line features, only line feature templates are listed for that command. If you want to find a template by name, you can enter it into the <Search> box.
This means a buffer will be created 300 meters (the map units) from the border of the selected polygon.
The new 300-meter polygon buffer feature is created using the properties of the Buffer zones feature template. The new feature is selected and is drawn on top of the existing feature.
In this exercise, you used an editing command, Buffer, to generate a feature from an existing feature
In the previous exercise, the Buffer command created a feature that is the extent of the original feature plus the buffer distance. Since this feature should just be the buffer, you need to remove the shape of the original inner feature from the current buffer feature. You can use the Clip command on the Editor menu to cut a hole in the polygon feature.
You will also use the Cut Polygons tool to split a polygon by an overlapping line feature.
The new feature is drawn on top of the existing one. To use Clip, you need to select the underlying existing feature. The Edit tool has special capabilities to help you select the correct feature from overlapping ones.
Since there are multiple selectable features where you clicked, the selection chip may appear near where you just clicked.
Features are listed in the selection chip by their display expression, which is set on the Layer Properties > Display tab.
You will use this feature to clip a hole in the Buffer zone polygon. The Clip command only clips polygon features that are within a buffer distance of a selected feature—in this case, the Isolated Mesa Tops research area.
This way, you will be clipping to the exact border of the selected feature rather than at a distance from it.
This removes the overlapping area from the feature that is being clipped.
The overlapping area is clipped and now the original Research areas feature is visible through the hole in the buffer feature.
Since the buffer feature has a hole in it, its geometry is represented in ArcGIS as a multipart polygon. Multipart features either contain holes in them or are composed of more than one physical part that only references one set of attributes. For example, the individual islands that make up Hawaii are often represented as a multipart polygon feature.
The neighboring research area needs to be divided into two polygons based on the river that runs through the middle. You can use the Cut Polygons tool to split the polygon.
To use the Cut Polygons tool, you need to select the polygon, then digitize a line where you want to cut the polygon. To change the shape of the line used to cut the polygon, click a construction method type on the Feature Construction mini toolbar. Segments can be created using a variety of methods, for example, as straight lines, with curves, or traced from the shapes of other features.
If you are cutting a polygon along a simple line, you can click to draw the line using the Straight Segment construction method. However, in this case, the river feature you want to use to cut with is long and curved, so it will be easier to trace around the border to create the line.
This turns on snapping to intersections between features, which will help you ensure that the line used to cut the polygon starts and stops at the intersection of the polygon and line edges.
You may need to zoom in to snap to the correct point.
You are finishing the sketch used to cut the polygon. The polygons flash on the map as the cut is made and the new features are selected. If an error occurs, ensure that you have the correct feature selected, try the trace again, then make sure your line goes completely across the polygon. It may help to zoom in when you start and end the trace.
In this exercise, you learned how to clip polygons and split them by tracing along an overlapping line feature.
In the previous exercise, you edited whole features. In this exercise, you will be editing the vertices and segments that make up a feature. You can double-click a feature with the Edit tool to edit its shape. When you do this, the Edit tool pointer changes from a black arrow to a white arrow to show you can directly select vertices and modify segments.
The Edit Vertices mini toolbar provides quick access to some of the most commonly used commands when editing vertices. It appears on the bottom-center of the screen whenever either the Edit tool or the Topology Edit tool is active and you are editing the vertices of a feature or topology edge. You will drag the vertices and handles to edit the shape of a line that was poorly digitized on a trailhead that starts at a road and ends near a stream.
When you are viewing the sketch geometry of a feature, the Edit Vertices toolbar appears, giving you quick access to commands used when editing a feature's vertices and segments.
When compared to the aerial photograph, notice that this line is straight when it should be curved, and it also has some extra vertices. You can easily change a straight segment into a circular arc or Bézier curve, and vice versa, and delete the extra vertices. A Bézier curve is smooth and has on each of its two endpoints handles that can be moved to change the direction and the steepness of the curve. You can create Bézier curves by digitizing them using the Bézier Curve sketch construction method or by using certain editing commands, such as Smooth on the Advanced Editing toolbar.
The segment changes to an arc.
This deletes those vertices, as they are in the incorrect locations and are not needed to maintain the shape of the line in this area.
This allows you to continue working with the segments and vertices.
A new set of Bézier curve handles is added, and the segment changes into an S-shaped curve. You can see the locations of the vertices and handles, which are displayed in blue.
You get different pointer icons depending on the type of point you are over.
If you need to refine the line's shape further, double-click it again with the Edit tool and modify the segments. If you want to insert or delete a vertex, use the tools on the Edit Vertices toolbar.
You changed segments into different types and edited vertices.
[GSA1]There is no project file in the folder
[GSA2]It’s saying there are no editable layers (the Ranger stations layer is read only)
[GSA3]Also not editable
[GSA4]Does not show up—not editable.