Upslope and downslope distance or area using ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

Is there a possibility to determine the surface area above the road and the surface of the terrain below the road or between two or more roads? I want to pull the trees down the hill and up the hill to the roads. The price of skidding trees is different so I would like to know what the surface (ha) is above and below the road?

Here is an example, orange is uphill and red is downhill. I think this is solved with a raster calculator

Here is the method, but I do not know how to solve it in ArcGIS Desktop

Answer 1

In ArcGIS, convert the road to a raster using Polyline to Raster. Using your surface model create a flow direction raster using the Spatial Analyst Hydrology tools. Use the flow direction raster and the rasterized road to generate a watershed using the Watershed tool. The resulting watershed will be all the areas that are uphill of the road.

Answer 2

One way I can think of is to convert your DEM raster to points. Then use v.to.points to get points at equal spacing along the roads layer.

Use v.sample on the road points layer to get the height value from original DEM.

Next, use the NNJoin plugin to join each DEM point to the nearest road point. You should now have a points layer that covers your study area, gives the height of the point and the height of the nearest road point.

Use field calculator to subtract the height of the nearest road point from the point height.

Interpolate a surface from these points.

reclassify the interpolated raster to positive numbers = 1 (above), negative numbers = 0 (below)

Answer 3

Can't comment directly on an answer yet, but to add more details about input parameters for the Path Allocation Distance gp tool in ArcMap (IMO a bit more detail in nagib's answer would be helpful).

The "in_surface_raster" parameter equals your DEM (I hydrologically conditioned my DEM first). The "in_source_data" parameter is the road raster created in step 1 of nagib's answer.

The "in_cost_raster" parameter in path distance allocation tool for this type of analysis considers at least slope and land cover. Here's a helpful link for creating a cost surface raster combining those two variables: http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/tools/spatial-analyst-toolbox/creating-a-cost-surface-raster.htm

Also, in the path distance allocation tool help it suggests using the output of Aspect gp tool (in other words, an aspect raster) in the "in_horizontal_raster" parameter of the path allocation distance gp tool.