Assigning land values within buffer using ArcGIS for Desktop?

Question

I'm new to ArcGIS and having some trouble getting this done.

I have a layer consisting of points of bird nesting sites and I have created a multiple ring buffer around this site, with rings at 5 km and 10 km. What I need to do is assign a value of "1" the area within the 5 km inner buffer ring and a value of "2" to the 10 km outer buffer ring so I have two separate values for the buffer. Does anybody know how I can do this? I'm using version 10.2.

Answer 1

If you're using the multiple ring buffer tool provided by arcgis, it includes a distance column in the output feature class (which you can rename or omit). It should have your 5km buffers listed in the attribute table with a value of 5 (it might be different if your spatial reference doesn't measure things in meters).

I would simply select based on attributes to select all values of 5 in the distance column then use the field calculator to set the selected values equal to 1 in whatever column you'd like. Do the same thing for the 10km buffers, and you should be good.

Answer 2

You can accomplish this using the following workflow:

1. Add a new field to the multiring buffer "Value". This will be either 1 or 2.
2. Use the Spatial Join (Analysis) tool to transfer the attributes of the buffer to the points.