The Near tool has a few problems and is missing a few important features:
- You cannot specify the output fields. The tool is hard coded to create NEAR_FID, NEAR_DIST, NEAR_ANGLE, etc.
- It does not handle polygons (fixed in 9.3).
- It does not handle rasters. Specifically, it would be nice to handle distance from points to nearest raster zone.
- It cannot copy fields from the nearest feature to the input feature.
- There is no easy way to handle the batch processing scenario: given a single point feature class of animal observations that include dates, run Near on a time series of feature classes, where each feature class represents, for example, the extent of Antarctic sea ice for a given date.
I need tools to address these problems, as part of the Antarctic minke whale habitat modeling project. I could implement one-off scripts specifically for that project, but the scenarios are common enough that we should develop reusable tools.
