I am trying to run spatial stats (% area of overlap of various datasets) with the World Database of Protected Areas marine shapefile. It's a global collection of marine protected areas, so it's a big polygon file. But I can't seem to do any geoprocessing with it. Clip, Merge, Dissolve... anything I try just runs for hours, never getting anywhere, and I eventually have to cancel it and restart ArcMap.
I've tried manually merging small subsets of polygons (by Edit>Merge), and it appears that particular polygons are causing the problem ("The Merge command could not be completed"), but I have no way I identifying the problem polygons (or why they are problems), and there seems to be many throughout the dataset of >14,000 polygons.
Has anybody worked with the WDPA dataset, and had issues using it in any geoprocessing? How do I make this great dataset useful to me?