Does anyone have a recommendation for a good reference/tutorial(s) on Spatial Analyst?
The most recent I can find are from early to mid 2000s so perhaps SA has not changed much since then.
1 Answer
The online help, for ArcGIS 10 will provide better help than has been provided before, but as Bill suggests, the fundamental concepts exist in Tomlin's book and haven't been altered significantly. The book's principles are also applicable to any GIS package that works with raster data and supports map algebra.
- http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/pdf/spatial-analyst-tutorial.pdf
- http://www.colgate.edu/portaldata/imagegallerywww/9f6bbcda-184d-4f20-bf0f-05069a418363/ImageGallery/15_GEOG245_Tutorial8.pdf
- http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/A_quick_tour_of_Spatial_Analyst/005900000002000000/
- http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/About_the_ArcGIS_Spatial_Analyst_Tutorial/00nt00000002000000/
@djq found Maguire's book to be very helpful.
@book{Maguire2005,
Author = {Maguire, D.J. and Batty, M. and Goodchild, M.F.},
Keywords = {GIS, UIS},
Publisher = {ESRI, Redlands, CA},
Title = {Gis spatial analysis and modelling},
Year = {2005}}
@whuber commented that:
Changes to SA have focused on supporting more file formats. Apart from simple changes in command syntax and a few tweaks (such as PathDistance, which enhances CostDistance), it has offered essentially the same suite of capabilities since 1995 (which are those in by the former GRID module for ArcInfo written, I guess, some 30 years ago). In fact, much of SA is still just a wrapper around GRID. Indeed, if you read through Dana Tomlin's book (Geographic Information Systems and Cartographic Modeling, 1990) you should quickly be able to master SA.