Any help you can give an inexperienced college GIS user would be greatly appreciated.
I am using both ArcGIS ArcMap 9.3 and 10 on desktop (i.e. not online), and the only info I can find on License Type on college computers is 'ArcInfo'.
I have a set of forestry data that maps forestry type (species/age class etc) for a small country. With this data I am attempting to evaluate suitable habitat by identifying woodlands over a certain size (>200ha) with particular make up of tree species (mostly coniferous/broadleaf).
The problem I am having is that the shapefile has polygons made according to individual tree species. Is there a way to cluster the individual tree species, so I can attain one larger polygon for the entire woodland, and thereby have an area value for the woodland as a whole, instead of the individual parts (both due to seperate species, or division due to a fence, for example).
There are thousands of polygons in the dataset, so it is not feasible to get the sum individual ones, with the time I have available to me.