I have two shapefiles, one polygon one points. The points represent specific field sampling locations. The polygons represent land divisions. The land divisions have a unique 16 digit identifier. The plots have numbers unique to each polygon. Ie: polygon 0401010011190084 has plots 1-4. I need to create a field in the plots shapefile that will be populated with the polygon number in which it lies. Typing them in by hand sucks. I need to populate this field in order to get the plots to load correctly into a database. How can do this easily? The plots shapefile needs to remain as points only.
1 Answer
You can do a spatial join between the two layers. This joins the two layers based on a spatial rule you can define.
For ArcMap
For QGIS
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That's a fine answer. Without knowing the software it's hard to give instructions - but at least the Op can download QGIS if they don't already have it. One other handy tip when joining points to any geometry type is Near (advanced license only) resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//… and as described gis.stackexchange.com/questions/15790/… then attribute join. Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 0:23