Free Geography Tools

Several free tools for ArcGIS from Jenness Enterprises, including ESRI International User Conference prize winners. Don’t currently work on ArcGIS 10, but that may change.

Repeating Shapes Tool – “This tool generates an array of repeating shapes over a user-specified area. These shapes can be hexagons, squares, triangles, circles or points, and they can be generated with any directional orientation.”

Tools For Graphics and Shapes – “This extension includes a large suite of tools for calculating geometric attributes of vector features and for selecting and naming graphics. All tools are available at the ArcView license level. Among many other functions, this extension offers tools for calculating the true area and centroid of polygons as they lay on the sphere, thereby avoiding errors caused by projection distortions. This extension also offers tools to calculate true lengths of polylines as they lie on the spheroid, using Vincenty’s equations. This manual thoroughly explains all algorithms used to calculate geometric attributes on the sphere and spheroid.”

DEM Surface Tools – “This extension provides you with tools to generate a variety of surface characteristics of a landscape, using both projected and unprojected (i.e. latitude / longitude) digital elevation model (DEM) rasters. These tools include:

1. Surface Area and Ratio of a landscape
2. Slope, with 3 slope algorithm options
3. Aspect, with 3 aspect algorithm options
4. Hillshade, with optional hypsometric tinting
5. Multi-directional Oblique-Weighted Hillshade, with optional hypsometric tinting
6. Six types of Landscape Curvature”

Raster Extractor – “The Raster Extractor tool allows you to extract any number of rasters from an existing raster catalog and load them as individual rasters in your map, thereby allowing you to analyze them in ways that the Raster Catalog does not allow. The tool also gives you the option to mosaic all the rasters into a single raster dataset, modify the cell size and trim the final raster to the visible extent.”

Corridor Designer Toolbox – For designing corridors for the free flow of wildlife through urban landscapes. Includes a general designer, corridor evaluation tool, and land facet corridor design tool. Notes on website suggest that this is unlikely to be upgraded to ArcGIS 10 compatibility.