I have a dataset with amenities. I've created a buffer of 200 meters around each amenity.
m_circles <- st_buffer(m, dist = 200)
It looks like this:
How can I keep only the buffers (polygons) that do not touch or overlap other buffers?
R Buffer Selection – How to Select Non-Overlapping Buffers in R
bufferoverlapping-featuresrsf
Related Solutions
If you're using ArcGIS 10, you can do it without Editor or Info by creating the buffer as a different layer, then doing a Union (Analysis->Overlay) on the initial layer and the buffer. This should create additional fields in the dataset, for instance if the unique field is "Name", then there should be a field "Name_1". In other words the union is basically joins the structure of both layers together.
You can then filter out all shapes where "Name" is nothing (Deifinition Query = "Name"<>'') [two single quote marks after <>] which should leave you with just the initial shapes, split by the buffers.
You can then calculate the area of each of these objects into a new field and do a spatial join on the buffer layer counting the sum of the area of the filtered Union Layer.
Hopefully this graphic illustrates this visually.
I would Intersect the buffers, turning the overlap into polygons.
Apply a Spatial Join from the original Points to assign the original ID, clear the ID's that don't have a match.
Join the two layers on the ID to compare Area. The buffers that overlapped have buffer.area > intersect.area.
Best Answer
You can use a geometry predicate test, for example
st_intersects, to see which features features from another feature set intersect with. With one argument you get a test of each feature with every feature including itself, so any feature that only intersects with one feature is intersecting with no other features. Subset on that.Example:
Make 26 points in a unit square:
Make some buffers:
Subset the buffers that don't intersect anything apart from themselves:
Note that this is equivalent to finding all points with nearest neighbour greater than the buffer distance away from them. If what you really want to do is find points where the nearest point is greater than some threshold then look at nearest neighbour computation packages which are computationally much more efficient than computing buffers and doing intersection tests.