Find and Style Detailed Water Polygons for your Maps

Finding reasonably detailed, current, map content like water areas can be a real challenge to map makers. Here's how you can find (and download) pretty high res, timely, land cover data, and convert it to vector polygons for your map. Plus a bunch of different ways to style water in ArcGIS Pro, if you are into that.
Here's the app where you can explore, and download, land cover data: livingatlas.arcgis.com/landco...
0:00 Large scale vs small scale
0:42 Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer
1:13 Downloading land cover data
1:33 Isolating a section of the image
2:44 Optional step to extract only water (or whatever)
3:07 Converting the raster image to polygons
3:31 Filtering polygons to only water
4:33 Styling: wavy water fill
5:21 Styling: coastal gradients
6:01 Styling: rippled water rings
7:13 Styling: beveled edge water
7:59 Styling: stylistic pattern fill
8:30 Other land cover features you can use this on
Music: Venkatesananda by Jesse Gallagher
Check out some other social channels where I share how-to's and updates on random map adventures:
adventuresinmapping.com
www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/auth...
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[@maryamkhan3631]

always enchanted and in awe of the symbology you come up with

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks Maryam!

[@alexfriant3235]

Your UI contribution plug was hilarious 😀 Fantastic and fun tutorial. You're hired!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks!

[@saintuk70]

Nice one, welcomed distraction on a Friday afternoon.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

ah, great!

[@timothymiller559]

This is amazing. I remember scouring the internet for LULC data and it would still be years old.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

yes! and i could never seem to find what i needed, even if it was old.

[@andresimplicio2131]

Thank you again John!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

you bet, Andre!

[@vic_the_slick]

Can’t get enough of these videos! ❤

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks!

[@dominiontheory]

Pour a glass of clean clear water and reflect on how f-in cool this video is!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks!

[@GISandGenieCivil]

You're the best , Brilliant

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks for the kind words!

[@bobsage]

There he is! Splendid.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks Bob!

[@ethenjones4533]

No joke, I've been thinking about some water feature related maps to experiment with (inspired by your Storybook one) and this is perfect for what I needed!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Perfect!

[@BishopMaple]

Another gold star for Mr. Nelson! ⭐

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

ha, thanks!

[@TheGonnagle]

Friggin' awesome.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks!

[@Tazarve]

Thank you ❤

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

You bet!

[@caiocouto3168]

If you ever in Brazil, tell me. I would love to thank you for your videos in person!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks Caio!

[@matthewhollingworth4390]

Good method! If you have lidar data for the map area, there will be voids/gaps in the point cloud in water areas. So it's also possible (and quite effective) to extract water polygons from lidar.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

cool! i need to use lidar more.

[@Kamereone]

Had to give the "thumbs up" in the first 10 seconds!

[@Kamereone]

Serious question/comment time, since you mentioned contributing to the Sentinel data project... How can we contribute to help improve the Sentinel-2's coverage algorithms? Zooming in to my hometown, it's all across the board! It seems to have a really hard time differentiating between rangeland and cropland, and it's lost entire housing developments and industrial parks in the trees while at the same time marking cornfields as built-up areas! The dashboard you linked is great - or it would be, if the data was anywhere near accurate. I can't imagine what chaos would break out if anyone with less than half a brain tried to use this as an authoritative source... "See, look, in the last year we grew as many forests as we developed land!"

[@CartoRedux]

I wonder how many digibytes are in a kajillabyte 🤔

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

it's the same as the number of Stanley Nickels to Schrute Bucks.

[@Andylatch]

I legit LOLd at the Sentinel 2 but from the Matrix pic

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

keen eye!

[@asujan]

great

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks Sujan!

[@SimonKedward]

Which of these water styles will work inside a vector basemap in AGOL. My water style gets defaulted to a solid dark blue, and I haven't played enough to make something really waterlike. Also nice tutorial on extracting data. I know several people in my org that will go nuts for this.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

that's great to hear, Simon! I'm not sure if any of these water symbols will hold true when uploaded to AGO. but AGO has lots of ways to style once the water is there.

[@DamienMansell]

tip of the hat to you sir

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

tipped back at you Damien!

[@jamisoncooper-leavitt5950]

Great video, and thanks for introducing the Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer. When you use the Raster to Polygon tool (3:31), your ArcGIS Pro is able to create the polygons really quick. What settings do you use, and what kind of a system do you have? I am wondering because I just recently upgraded my own system for it to be faster with these tools, but I still take an hour or two to draw all the polygons like you did here. I am also wondering what environment parameters you're using to make yours go so fast. Thanks.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks! i have a Dell Precission 5530 laptop. it's pretty good, but i still do a fair amount of waiting. i first cropped my image so i was vectorizing a much smaller area than the whole original image. that saves a lot of time, but i also fast-forwarded the vectorization process (where I say it took 5 minutes).

[@jamisoncooper-leavitt5950]

@@JohnNelsonMaps You did a good job with the fast forwarding. The video was seamless; I couldn't tell.

[@jamisoncooper-leavitt5950]

@@JohnNelsonMaps I rewatched your video and realized I was not applying the processing extents properly for the Raster to Polygon tool, and when I did so I had very similar results as you did in your demonstration.

[@TomHagenLawyer]

As a self-proclaimed ignoramous I have a question on your gradient strokes. What is the benefit of making one of the colors a 100% transparent khaki vs. making it no color? I'm sure there's a good reason, and follow your lead on it anyway. Love your videos!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

"no color" is still a color, it is just 100% transparent white. it's a misleading name. so if you, for example want a faded black line, and you chose black and then "no color" it would transition from black to transparent white and there would be a lot of gray tones in between.

[@kingastryszowska-hill1648]

How are you so amazing?!?!?!

[@thedactylbike]

Great video! I'm using the rippled water rings on coastlines but all my lines overlap instead of connect around close range islands. Any thoughts? Thank you!

[@thedactylbike]

Also, I am using the "accurate" setting on the offset effect to no avail :(

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

thanks! you need to ensure that your layer only has one big multipart feature. if there are multiple features, the lines will overlap. use the tool "singlepart to multipart" and then try the coastal ring trick.

[@annotoole5864]

This would be cool if it wasn't disappointing. It does not have useable polygons for most of rural Montana.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Send a link in the app for where it’s missing water, I can take a look

[@stillinorbit1]

John, please cite the background music source.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

it's Venkatesananda by Jesse Gallagher. my favorite. available in the youtube audio library.

[@chenshiyuan]

I don't know why the raster should be exported. I would like to ask if it is possible to directly use the downloaded land use data for raster conversion.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Yes, but I wanted a smaller area of interest

[@chenshiyuan]

@@JohnNelsonMaps Thank you for your answer, I tried it last night, but it took a long time to run, I would like to ask whether exporting raster and compressing will improve the running efficiency

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

@@chenshiyuan when i export a portion of the raster, it is to isolate only a portion of the image. this makes conversion to polygon much more manageable. compression will have no effect.

[@mandata143]

Sir, are you using QGIS?

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

i am using ArcGIS Pro

[@terhuneb]

1 Kajilobyte = 1000 metric buttloads

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Checks out

[@Mickol88]

thnx!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

you bet!