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I have shoreline vector data that corresponds to property ownership, and time series data referring to attributes such as erosion levels, shoreline class (ornamental, natural, regenerative), etc.

At this point I have two years of data, and I'm looking to generate a matrix of change, that describes from-to change, and no change (Natural shoreline to Ornamental, or Natural to Ornamental, as examples). With 4 shoreline classes, there are 16 possible change scenarios.

Any suggestions, I primarily use Arc10, but I am also enjoy open source solutions.

In advance, thanks for your time!

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  • What form are your data in? Vector, raster, measures along the coastlines, observations at fixed monitoring points, something else? Are the changes in shoreline shape due to erosion going to be a problem?
    – whuber
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 14:27
  • Sorry, I should have been more specific then just vector. I have line work that corresponds to just the shoreline, and is split by ownership (parcel fabric). Each feature has temporal data associated with it (i.e. shoreline class for year x and shoreline class for year y, for an example).
    – Czed
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 14:31
  • Shoreline shape will not be a problem - all data is associated with the same line work.
    – Czed
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 14:47

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I'm using ArcGIS 9x but ArcGIS 10 has the same tool which is called Feature Compare (under Data Management\Data Comparison).

From your question it isn't really clear to me how your data precisely looks like. However, the tools allows you to compare two features with each other in respect to geometry and attributes. The result will be a text file that can be imported into excel or python for further analysis or manipulation.

So I guess with this it is rather a question how you organize your data before letting Arcgis do the comparison.

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  • 2
    Thanks a lot! I saw this tool as well, but I ended up just using the field calculator to create a new field and concatenating fields to get "<year x shoreline class> to <year y shoreline class>". This gave me change and no change details that I could summarize into a text file.
    – Czed
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 16:02

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