Querying based on Spatial Relationships
Credits: L. Meisterlin with Moses Levich, Thiago Lee, and Erik Strand (2021)
Included in this tutorial
Selecting by Location through the ArcGIS Pro interface
The Select by Location dialog
Building a spatial query
Software version in examples: ArcGIS Pro 2.8.2
Tutorial Data: The tutorial includes demonstration with sample data available here.
This tutorial covers constructing spatial queries to select features dataset based on their location relative to other features.
Select by Location through the ArcGIS Pro Interface
The Select By Location dialogue
Access the Select by Location dialogue by clicking through Map > Selection > Select By Location in the Main Menu ribbon. Choose the selection method from the dropdown menu.
As with Interactive Selection and Selection by Attributes, changing the selection method allows adding to, subtracting from, or selecting from within the current selection.
When selecting by location, features are selected from the Input Features based on their spatial relationship to the Selecting Features. Use the Relationship menu to choose from between various spatial relationships.
the Select by Location dialogue box
Building a spatial query
This example demonstrates selecting features from Points1_Table1_Join that are within 500 feet of a subway entrance. (TIP: The dialogue box can almost be read as a statement, combining the italicized phrases in the previous sentence.) To do this, we…
Choose the Input Features layer (Points1_Table1_Join) within the dropdown menu of layers within the project or browse to the desired layer.
In the Relationship dropdown, choose the spatial relationship between the target layer and selecting features. In this example, we want to select features from the target layer that are Within a distance of the selecting features.
The Selecting Features in this example are the features within the subway_entrances layer.
The "Within a Distance" relationship option requires that we specify a Search distance. For our example, we then type "500" and choose Feet as our distance unit from the dropdown menu.
building a spatial selection