Learning ArcGIS Pro

Other commonly used geoprocessing analysis tools
With more than 300 geoprocessing tools, you have only begun to scratch the surface of the
types of analysis that you can perform with ArcGIS Pro. ArcGIS Pro includes tools that
allow you to perform spatial analysis of your data. This is broken down into several
toolsets including Overlay, Proximity, and Statistics within the Analysis toolbox.
Overlay analysis
Overlay analysis compares two or more layers and locating areas where they overlap one
another. Depending on which tool you use, you can determine only the areas where they
overlap or erase the areas where they overlap or combine the total areas of all the inputs.
The Overlay toolset includes the following tools:
Tool name
Minimum licensing
level
Short description
Erase Advanced Clips out areas of overlap from input features
Identify Advanced Calculates areas of overlap and no overlap
Intersect Basic Returns area of overlap only
Union Basic Combines total area of input polygons
Update Advanced Replaces area of overlap with new features
Spatial Join
Symmetrical
Difference
Basic
Advanced
Joins attributes from one feature to another based on spatial
relationship
Identifies areas where features do not overlap
ArcGIS Pro introduces a new Pairwise toolset that also performs overlay analysis. Tools
in this toolset are designed to be used with extremely large datasets. They will provide
simpler results than those created with the standard Overlay tools.
Now you will take a closer look at the two Overlay analysis tools that are available at all
licensing levels: Union and Intersect.
Union
The Union tool takes the input of multiple polygon layers and combines all the
information into a single feature class that contains all the data from the two or more input
layers. It is important to remember this tool only works with polygons. It may not be used
with points or lines. If you need to perform this type of analysis on points or lines, you
would need to use the Identity tool.
You might want to use the Union tool if you wish to determine how much of each parcel
was in a floodplain area and how much of each parcel was not in a floodplain area as
illustrated in the following figure: