[gdal-dev] extract information from polygon shapefile based on raster grid?

[Jan Heckman]

Hello Chao,

I may not understand your wish quite well, but I think you need some
datastructure which conforms to the elements of the grid and receives
addtional information derived from a number of shapes with attributes.
Your output could be another shapefile,  with the summed results as
attributes, like the number of fires.
In the case that the only spatial relationship between shapes and
gridelements is whether or not a shape falls inside, you can indeed
simplify the polygon shape to pointshapes (centerpoints) which can be
converted to a raster of 1's and 0's. Then you could use a dictionary to
put the shapeattributes in the right place. I see a problem when several
shapes fall into the same grid-element, having different attribute values.
So you would be better off with a way of rasterbuilding, where each
attribute is summed per gridelement over all the shapes that fall inside.
Such routines exist at least in several programs.
Alternatively, you can make a polygon shapefile which conforms to the
rasterelements, then do a spatial join between your (centerpoint) shapefile
and and the rastershape (effectively adding a field to the pointshapes
which is the index into the grid), then add the several attribute data per
gridelement by e.g. making a pivot table.
If you have to work with shapes that are larger than the gridelements, you
would need another solution; there would be a choice between sampling the
shapes or distributing shape attributes proportionally to calculated
overlap with (polygonal) gridelements.

So, more simply still,  assuming the grid is regular and it is possible to
compute the gridindex from pointcoordinates:

Add an index field to the centerpoint shape which has the attributes;
calculate the gridindex from the coordinates and put this into the index
field;
bring the table e.g. into excel;
do a pivot table for the attributes (count or sum).
If necessary, add the centerpoint coordinates to the resulting table;
convert the table into a new point shape with the desired attributes.

Hope I got you right and this helps,
Jan

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Chao YUE <chaoyuejoy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am using the python binding of GDAL for reading polygon shapefiles.
>
> I have a polygon shapefile which contains the fire polygon and burned
> area, with typical fires burning on 10-100ha.
> my model simulation result is based on 0.5degree X 0.5degree. So I need to
> extract from this shapefile on each gridcell
> of the 0.5d X 0.5 grid the information about like number of fires and mean
> fire size etc.
>
> The approach I am thinking currently is to calculate the center of each of
> fire polygon, and check which 0.5d X 0.5d gridcell
> it falls in, then build a huge dictionary with key as the numpy index of
> the 0.5dX0.5d array, with the dictionary values as
> the list(or array or pandas dataframe) which include the information of
> all the polygons falling within the the same grid cell.
>
> I don't know if there is a better approach than this? I appreciate any
> comments.
>
> best regards,
>
> Chao
>
> --
>
> ***********************************************************************************
> Chao YUE
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>
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