Identifying the central feature of geographic distribution

You now know how to calculate the geographic center for a group of features. As you have seen, this can be very useful to help locate new structures, event sites, and so on. It can also be used to compare two sets of data to see whether there is a shift or movement over time. But what if you need to know what feature within a group is the most central? Can you do that?

You can do this using the Center Feature tool. This tool is in the Spatial Statistics Tools toolbox and the Measuring Geographic Distributions toolset. The Central Feature tool identifies the most central feature in a point, line, or polygon in the input feature class. It does this by calculating the distances from the centroid of each feature to every other feature’s centroid. Once that has been calculated, the tool selects the feature that has the shortest distance to all other features and copies it to a new output feature class. The shortest distance calculation...