Distance between points along a polyline

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02-01-2015 05:36 AM
JodyCamille
New Contributor II

I have points marking tagged fish locations along a river. How do I measure the distance between each of those successive points?

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24 Replies
KyleCrawford2
New Contributor III

When testing out your code above the script will run, but the first point values return 0 for both DistStart and DistPrev.

Why would this be?

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XanderBakker
Esri Esteemed Contributor

Do you have geographic coordinates?

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KyleCrawford2
New Contributor III

Made the mistake of not correcting the geographic coordinates. Once corrected script works great thanks for sharing it.

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MohammedAlhessi2
New Contributor

you have many choices. Using the linear referencing as Mohammed Magdy mentioned gives you the cumulative distance from the start of the river. There is another method which utilizes the "Point Distance Tool". The output of the tool is a table containing all distances from any point to other points. For example, If you have 8 points, then the distances from the point 1 to the other seven points are computed and then the distances from point 2 to the other seven points are computed and stored and so on.

There is another method which could be useful. you can split the river into segments at the fishing sites using "Split Line At Point" tool and store the output in a feature class inside a geodatabase. then you can find the distances stored in the Shape_Length field of the output feature class.

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KelseyRydland
New Contributor

If you have the Network Analyst extension I think you might find that it is easiest to use the Origins Destinations (OD) Cost Matrix tool. I have done this for several instances like this and it works well. You do need to create a network dataset using fish locations as point data and then your stream(s) as your line data. ESRI has a nice overview of the tool here:

http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//00480000000m000000

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