There have been various renditions of tools for generating spider diagram tools in ArcMap throughout the years. Over time as many of the Esri tool-posting websites have become defunct these third party tools have become difficult to find. I decided to put together a simple tool for generating spider diagrams for my own purposes and decided to share it.
Spider lines depict Euclidean distance-based routes that connect each pair of points. They are a useful tool for visualization. In landscape genetics this represents the isolation-by-distance hypothesis. Previously there were other 3rd party tools that achieved this on the Arcscripts website. Currently it appears that this functionality is only available with a Business Analyst license of ArcGIS. This tool make a few assumptions:
1. You wish to connect all pairs of points
2. You have a point shapefile
3. The point shapefile is in a projected coordinate system
4. The point shapefile has fields called "Easting" and "Northing" that represent the X and Y coordinates respectively. If these fields are not named this excatly then the tool will fail
5. You have a field that describes the name of the pairs of the site (point).
Please do not use a geodatabase feature class.
Output line shapefile (or geodatabase if you specify that) attributed with the following:
1. Input FID
2. Easting
3. Northing
4. Easting_1
5. Northing_1
6. Near_FID
7. Site
8. Site_1
If you end up using this tool for published work please feel free to cite this as:
Dilts, T.E. (2018) Spider Diagram Tools for ArcGIS (insert your version here). University of Nevada Reno, Available at: https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=fb7d157782a549b182c957abbaaf45c2.
You can download the tool by clicking
HERE.
