ArcGIS Desktop 10.5 has been available for download for a while now. In this release we’ve brought over some new tools that first appeared in ArcGIS Pro, but we’ve also improved performance in several key areas. Read on to find out more.
Locate Regions
Do you do a lot of work in suitability modelling? Once you’ve done some processing and identified a number of potentially suitable areas, you then had to come up with a way to go through them to select the most viable candidates. The Locate Regions tool comes to the rescue! With it you can more easily identify the regions that best satisfy your criteria based on size requirements and spatial constraints.
Here are some examples of the types of analysis you can do with this tool:
- Identify the best deer habitats to preserve by considering not only the minimum patch sizes, but also the proximity of those patches so that they can be connected by passable wildlife corridors.
- Identify the best locations from which to extract timber in a financially viable way, by having plots of a certain minimum size that are still within a certain distance from each other.
- Identify the ideal location for a new shopping center which not only needs a certain amount of area, but that area is required to be both contiguous and in the most compact shape possible.
Segmentation and Classification
The Remove Raster Segment Tiling Artifacts tool that first appeared in ArcGIS Pro 1.2 is now available in ArcGIS Desktop 10.5. After using the Segment Mean Shift tool to identify features or segments in your imagery, on occasion there may have been some artifacts introduced into the output when processing very large datasets. You can use this tool to cleanly stitch those segments back together.
Distance tools
The algorithms used for the cost and path distance tools have been updated not only for improved performance, but also to give more accurate results.
A new characteristic parameter, Direction of Travel, is now available. You can use it to specify the direction of travel of the mover in your analysis, either from the source outwards to all other locations, or starting from all non-source locations going back to the mover. This parameter has been added to the following tools:
- Cost Allocation, Cost Back Link and Cost Distance
- Cost Connectivity
- Path Distance, Path Distance Allocation, and Path Distance Back Link
Default output raster
The default output raster format for Spatial Analyst tools has changed. As always, the location and name you specify for an output raster determines the format in which it is created. In previous releases, when the output location was a folder, the default output format was Esri Grid raster. It is now a TIFF raster. You can still create Grid rasters by removing the .tif extension from the output name. There is no change when your output location is to a geodatabase.
Final word
As always, we are always glad to get your feedback, so please give the new functionality a try. If you encounter any difficulties along the way, just let us know so we can go about better explaining things or fixing any problems.
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