[GIS] Merging shapefiles

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I have a query regarding the merging of shapefiles. I have 7 different landuse shapefiles which together covers all my study area. Now, inside my study area, there are 70 different priority areas for which I have to calculate the area of each types of landuse.

Therefore, I was thinking to merge 7 landuse shapefiles into 1 shapefile and clip the area of 70 different priority areas in order to get the area of the individual priority area (for example: 20 acre forest, 10 acre agriculture, 5 acre wetland…).

I was wondering if I would merge 7 shapefiles into 1 shapefile, is there any chance of losing any area especially on the edge of two shapefiles? If yes, could anyone suggest the right procedure so that I wouldn't lose/alter my original information of each individual shapefile.

Best Answer

Building on Dan C's answer, I would perform the following workflow:

  1. Merge
  2. Dissolve all shapefiles based on a common key (e.g. landuse code)
  3. Intersect your area of interest polygons with the land use polygons. This is always more efficient that clipping individual polygons and trying to extract pertinent data from the individual feature attributes.
  4. Summarize the land area by the intersect output attribute table.
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