Copy attribute data from one polygon shapefile to a multiple point shapefile

Question

I have two shapefiles:

1. Polygons of parks in Africa. Each park (polygon) has a row of data regarding it's size, name, date of establishment etc.
2. Random points in parks in Africa. Here, I generated 500 random points in each park.Therefore this attribute table has 500 (random points) x 224 parks = 96096 rows.

However, in my random points shapefile there is no indication of which points are in which park. I would like to know how I can get the park's name from the polygon shapefile to match each point ID that is in that park? I see that my random points shapefile has a column called CID which goes from 0 - 224 (Indicating the parks that the points are in), but I did not specify this and I would like park name to be there instead (even though I know it will be repeated 500 times for each matching row).

I am using ArcMap 10.2

Answer 1

You can accomplish this task with a variety of the analysis tools.

Intersect (Analysis)

Computes a geometric intersection of the input features. Features or portions of features which overlap in all layers and/or feature classes will be written to the output feature class.

Identity (Analysis)

Computes a geometric intersection of the input features and identity features. The input features or portions thereof that overlap identity features will get the attributes of those identity features.

Spatial Join (Analysis)

Joins attributes from one feature to another based on the spatial relationship. The target features and the joined attributes from the join features are written to the output feature class.