Map Your View! Create and Style a Viewshed in ArcGIS Online

Viewsheds are pretty cool. You feed it some observer locations and, based on underlying elevation data, it cranks out a polygon showing where you can see. So many uses for this. I'll show you how to make a simple one, with one observer location, standing at the peak of the tiny enclave mountaintop nation of San Marino. And I'll play around at styling it so that the viewshed is a spotlight, illuminating a dark basemap. Because I'm into that sort of thing.

0:00 Ravishing introduction
0:28 Firing up the viewshed tool in ArcGIS Online
1:24 The viewshed result
1:36 Viewshed as an illumination source
3:24 Creating buffers as a scale reference
4:17 Adding basemap labels
4:41 Manually labeling buffer distances
5:41 Bonus footage

Check out some other social channels where I share how-to's and updates on random map adventures:

Music: Venkatesananda by Jesse Gallagher

Thanks for watching! Love, John Nelson

[movax_]

Looks great! Can't wait to "View" some local areas. Thanks again, and again, and again.

[CartoRedux]

How many Nelson's you hiding in that shed???

[mariavittoriasantarelli]

This is so cool! I am from italy and did the same but using my balcony as viewpoint, results looked pretty similar to yours! Love it ahah I was trying to save this map to an image, selecting print, but there arent that many options and the pdf has the viewshed still with the original orange symbols. How can i save it to a cool picture like you did for yours? Thank you! I discovered your channel only recently and only this week my map making abilities skyrocketed thanks to your advice and demos! Thanks for your work :)

[heyyouwhome]

Very cool! Hey Mr. Nelson give us a real cool facility management project, maybe something with the indoors GIS extension😮. I love these videos and would really enjoy a John Nelson take on a FMS project.

[paulroulaine]

Can you create the same with ArcGIS Pro?

[Georgy_]

im binging your content now its amazing to see tips and trick along the way and some times the stories behind your parents and your chilhoud makes me connect more thank you Jhon, one question whats is your pc specs (CPU ram gpu) cause arc pros runs smooths on yours especially in 3d :p <3 that chicken at the end fits the vibe

[dozma]

Professor, I have a question not related to the video. I’m studying the different methods to classify my data in classes depending on its distribution. In a conference you did for URISA Texas you mentioned that your data was normally distributed so you would choose “Equal Interval”. Could you please help me to understand why is it a good method for normally distributed data? Thank you! 🫶🏼