Select from selection based on attribute table in ArcGIS or arcpy

Question

I selected polygons which are less than 313 m ² , and from that selection I need to select the ones that are completely within some other polygon. So, both selections are on the same shapefile.

I tried selection by attribute and by location which seems to respond.

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Answer 1

In order to find small polygons, you want to use Select by Attribute on the Shape.Area field.

Based on your comments and overall project goal, I suggest using Polygon Neighbors instead of trying to do everything with just Select tools.

The tool analyzes polygon contiguity, summarizing the

• Area of overlaps (overlapping neighbors—optional)
• The length of coincident edges (edge neighbors)
• The number of times boundaries cross or touch at a point (node neighbors)

between source polygons and neighbor polygons. The summary information is written to an output table. A source polygon may have one or more neighbor polygons; a neighbor polygon is spatially related with the source polygon in at least one of the above ways.

Since it generates a separate table, the arcpy script would need to be moderately more complex (reading that table and making some decisions based on the content), but it's absolutely a simpler approach when going through the procedure manually in ArcMap.