Creating buffers around points with lines as border

Question

I'm trying to create buffers with a 10 meter radius around points (springs). The problem is that the buffer should not cross lines (rivers) and not overlap each other. This should be done automatic with Python, because of the big dataset I have.

Here an image how the buffers should look like in the end.

One possible solution would be this. If i try to use arcpy.management.FeatureToPolygon(), as an iteration over each Buffer and the Lines, there would be two Problems:

1. Not all the lines does cross the whole buffer.
2. How to select the Features, which should be deleted.

The solution for the first Problem would be to extend the lines, that they extent over the buffer. This is an easy fix with a bit of trigonometry and Python.

The second issues is there I have my Problems.

The Features outside of my regular buffer I can easily select and delete, but how to delete the features behind the lines?

I thought about trying to create buffers on only one side of a line, and with this I can select the features I like to delete. But these buffers can also overlap with another feature I don't want to delete.

After I would have deleted the unwanted Features I would dissolve the rest and then merge every buffer into one feature class. After that I would use arcpy.analysis.RemoveOverlapMultiple() to remove the overlap of the overlapping Buffers

So my questions are, is there way to create a buffer with the lines directly as a border and if not is there a way to easily select the features I would like to delete automatically or is there another solution?

Answer 1

A possible solution which may not meet your needs is to use the Euclidean Allocation tool and set your river network to be the barrier layer. Below is an example of some points where maximum distance has been set to 100m and cell size is 10m, the resulting raster is then converted to simplified polygons (the red lines)

The smaller the output cell size the smoother the edge will be. Note the conversion to polygon introduces a slight overlap of polygon with source polyline for the orange pixels.

Answer 2

First split your buffers into groups, inside which buffers do not overlap:

Work with each color at a time:

arcpy.FeatureToPolygon_management(in_features="buffers;STREAMS", out_feature_class="in_memory/features", cluster_tolerance="", attributes="ATTRIBUTES", label_features="POINTS")

Note "label" option! Features that are labelled is what you need. Picture below shows output for 1st group (COLOR) of polygons: