Merging polygons into one single feature

Question

I have 73 polygons of Protected Areas, and I want to merge this into one single feature of protected areas and calculate area total of all of them, I tried using the merge tool, but I keep getting the output with all 73 polygons and attribute table fields.

I also tried doing the merge with the Edit tool, but it tells me to add the merged feature into one of the protected area polygons and doesn't let me calculate geometry.

These are my protected areas

And I want to have just one field that contains them all

Any direction in how to do this?

Answer 1

Start editing, select all of them - Merge:

And select one of them to take attributes from.

Answer 2

If you simply want to know the total area, you don't need to merge anything! Assuming you have a numeric field with the area this can be very easily summed.

Projected data held as a file geodatabase featureclass would have a shape_area field which you can simply right click on and choose Statistics as shown below, you can obviously do this on any numeric field.

This opens the following dialog which you can copy and paste results out of and it honours any selections

Answer 3

Another alternative to merge all the polygons into a single geometry is to use the Dissolve tool, which:

Creates a new coverage by merging adjacent polygons, lines, or regions that have the same value for a specified item.

As long as all the features share the same attribute (it seems that ID_SINAP would work in your case), it will merge all of them into a single one.