I am trying to identify areas of contiguous conservation easements using the NCED data. Unfortunately, the ArcGIS Polygon Neighbors tool only analyzes first-order contiguity while I'd like to analyze recursively. This python script for QGIS worked fine but also only returns first-order contiguity.
As per the top comment under this question (@Hornbydd) I think the best approach would be to utilize the iterators in ArcGIS ModelBuilder but I'm not sure it's possible.
Any ideas on other ways to conceptualize this so that I don't have to use rely on the polygon neighbors tool?
Or is the best method really just to dig in with custom python scripting?
I'm platform agnostic but more experienced with ArcPy than python with qgis.
The dissolve method works but still keeps some areas separate that in practical terms are contiguous even if the polygons are separate... in the screenshot below the two red outlined polygons should be one contiguous area... likely an artifact of disparate data sources but it would be great to set a distance on this (0.5 miles).