Sharpen Your GIS Skills: A Comprehensive Spatial Analysis Challenge in ArcGIS Pro

By Nicolas R. Malloy December 2, 2024

Rather than teaching new tools from scratch, this activity is designed to help you take stock of what you already know and push those skills a bit further. This lab assumes you have prior experience with GIS and ArcGIS Pro, and it intentionally avoids step-by-step instructions.You will be given a set of focused tasks that test your ability to work with spatial data, coordinate systems, attribute tables, and spatial queries in ArcGIS Pro. If some parts feel rusty, that is expected. This lab is meant to help you identify gaps, refresh key concepts, and get back into a GIS problem-solving mindset.

What You Should Know

At this time, you should already have a level of practical experience with GIS. This tutorial assumes that you learned the following skills:

• Organizing folders and files into a standardized workspace.
• Acquiring data from public sources.
• Using Esri Help Documentation to figure out unfamiliar tools.
• Repair broken links to data sources.
• Locate and read metadata for specific datasets.
• Check the spatial reference system, datums, and map projections for specific datasets.
• Check the spatial reference of the map window in ArcGIS Pro.
• Add XY data to the map window in ArcGIS Pro.
• Perform a table-join operation.
• Add a new field to an attribute table.
• Calculate geometry on a field in the attributes table.
• Use the field calculator to solve problems.
• Symbolize data using graduated colors, symbols, and data classification methods (natural breaks, quantile, equal intervals, etc.)
• Perform both attribute and spatial queries to select features on a map.
• Export selected features to create new map layers.