Esri ArcGIS Pro Foundation Certification Practice Test

You have been asked to determine which police beat areas an upcoming parade route intersects. Which overlay method would you use to create a feature class of overlapping areas and add police beat area attributes for those overlapping areas?

1. Spatial Join

2. Erase

3. Identity

4. Union

The correct answer is: Identity

Using the Identity overlay method is the appropriate choice for determining which police beat areas intersect with an upcoming parade route because it allows for the creation of a new feature class that includes the overlapping geometries along with their associated attributes. The Identity method retains attributes from both the input feature (the parade route) and the overlay feature (the police beats), providing the necessary data to analyze the interaction between them. When using the Identity method, the resulting feature class will contain only the areas where the two features intersect, making it particularly useful for this scenario. It provides you with a clear understanding of which police beats are affected by the parade route, as it preserves the geometry of the police beats while adding information about the parade route. Other methods such as Erase would remove portions of the overlay feature where they intersect with the input feature, which does not serve the purpose of understanding the overlaps. A Spatial Join would combine attributes based on their spatial relationship but would not create new geometries of the overlapping areas. The Union method would combine both features into a single feature class while preserving all attributes but may not specifically highlight only the overlaps, thus not providing a focused analysis on the parade route intersections with police beats.