How to Create Circular and Elliptical Buffers in ArcMap

Do you need to create a buffer around a point, line, or polygon in GIS? Do you need to know how to put an error ellipse around a point on your map? This video has your answer! Use the hyperlinks at the bottom of the video description to jump to the part of the video you need to watch!

In GIS, a buffer is a zone drawn around a map feature, usually measured in units of distance. ArcGIS allows buffers to be created for point, line, and polygon feature classes and shapefiles.

This Lightning GIS video demonstrates how to create three different types of buffers in ArcGIS: i) Simple Buffers, ii) Buffers based on an attribute, and iii) elliptical buffers.

Simple buffers are useful if you need to create buffers of the same diameter around all the features in your feature class.

Buffers based on an attribute allows you to create a custom-sized buffer around each feature based on a distance specified in an attribute table.

Elliptical buffers allow the creation of buffers that have different diameters along a major and a minor axis.

The data buffered in this tutorial are GPS locations and the buffers are drawn based on the +/- error associated with each GPS observation. There are many other applications of buffers and buffers are commonly used in all disciplines of GIS and Geospatial Science.

See ESRI’s help documentation for more information on buffers and some even more sophisticated techniques that go beyond what is shown in this tutorial: desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/tools/analy…

Table of Contents:

00:00 - Introduction
00:17 - What is a buffer?
00:46 - Simple Buffers Description
01:15 - Simple Buffers Demo
02:36 - Buffer by Attribute Description
03:13 - Buffer by Attribute Demo
04:29 - Elliptical Buffers Description
06:05 - Elliptical Buffer Demo
06:10 - Table to Ellipse Tool Attributes Explain
07:02 - Table to Ellipse Attribute Table
07:42 - Open Table to Ellipse Tool
08:51 - Review Table to Ellipse Tool Output
09:06 - Concluding Remarks
09:21 - Outro