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I'm trying to split polygons into equal areas. While fishnet sort of works; the areas I'm trying to split don't touch; they're national parks. Fishnet spans the whole area, not just the polygons in question. Ultimately, I'm searching for a method to split polygons into a user-given number of equal area polygons.

I've read everything I can about the Huber methods to do this in ArcView, but without access to that (or experience with it) this isn't the answer for me.

Thanks very much.

R.K.
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MBarretts20
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  • Have you considered this similar question: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/5300/how-can-i-can-i-divide-a-polygon-into-specific-sizes-using-arcgis – dassouki Jan 24 '11 at 20:52
  • Are the national parks polygons or multipolygons? How would you like those to be handled? – underdark Jan 24 '11 at 21:45
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    I have tried to describe the algorithm in a non-AV centric way (in the link provided by @dassouki). It will work in any GIS that supports scripting where you can (a) implement a 1D root finding algorithm, (b) clip polygons to rectangles, and (c) compute the area of a polygon. (A variant replaces (b) by (b') internally buffer polygons by specified amounts. This will dissect polygons into pseudo-concentric rings of specified area.) – whuber Jan 25 '11 at 14:37
  • Thanks all (and Bill specifically). I'll have to think out root finding (slightly over my head) but the rest seems do-able. I don't have the specific polygons yet, but I would likely dissolve them each into a single pg for each park. I'll pursue the Huber method, but I believe fishnet may work as well for my needs. With that, I can set the exact size of the cells I want (total area / x) and then just intersect the net with the parks. Some non-park, but that's not essential. Thanks again; will keep posted. – MBarretts20 Jan 25 '11 at 16:02
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    @MBarretts Read sections 9.0 - 9.3 of Numerical Recipes; this will teach you all you need to know about root finding. http://www.nr.com/bookreader_chooser.html . I am curious about how "fishnet works," because as far as I can tell that just coarsely grids your polygons: something has to happen afterwards to effect the splitting. – whuber Feb 02 '11 at 16:51
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    @mbarretts, you say what software you don't have, Arcview, but you don't say what you do have. Also do you mean each split poly has to have the identical area , as in numerically identical # of sq km's for each feature? Because fishnet will not do that, some fishnet squares will be entirely within the parent poly, and others will only partially overlap. – matt wilkie Feb 16 '11 at 07:44
  • No trivial mathmatics I think, but into the blue, Constrainted triangulation will of the polygon with a given areal size of the triangles will solve the problem? – huckfinn Jan 29 '14 at 19:38

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