I have a series of sampling points along a coastline and I want to calculate minimum pairwise distances for all points circumventing the land. I also have the coastline as a polygon shapefile. As far as I can tell one way to do it is to create a cost grid assigning maximum values to land cells and minimum values to sea cells followed by least cost path analysis but I am not sure how to do this. Is there any other way to achieve the same result (e.g. calculating distances around a "land mask"?
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Hi,
thanks for your reply but it seems I didn't explain clearly my objective, I apologise...
I have around 50 sampling points rather close to the coast and what I need to do is calculate the minimum distance from each of them to all the others (essentially create a triangular distance matrix of 50x50). I mention the coastline not because I am interested in the distance of each point to the coast but because the connecting paths between points may not cross the land (e.g. peninsulas or small islands). If you have any suggestions I would be grateful.
Thanks again
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Ok, I think I would try to calculate this with a statistics software, for example with R (but I do not know if there is a special module available in R to calculate such a distance matrix, but I would expect it)
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Allright, thanks very much for your suggestion
I did try to solve this with the least cost paths tool, but I ended up calculating the least cost path of each point to its "closest" one only, which is not what I need.
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I have a series of sampling points along a coastline and I want to calculate minimum pairwise distances for all points circumventing the land. I also have the coastline as a polygon shapefile. As far as I can tell one way to do it is to create a cost grid assigning maximum values to land cells and minimum values to sea cells followed by least cost path analysis but I am not sure how to do this. Is there any other way to achieve the same result (e.g. calculating distances around a "land mask"?
Hi,
not sure to understand your task, but how about the following approach:
This way, you would calculate the shortest distance from each point to the coastline/land.
Hi,
thanks for your reply but it seems I didn't explain clearly my objective, I apologise...
I have around 50 sampling points rather close to the coast and what I need to do is calculate the minimum distance from each of them to all the others (essentially create a triangular distance matrix of 50x50). I mention the coastline not because I am interested in the distance of each point to the coast but because the connecting paths between points may not cross the land (e.g. peninsulas or small islands). If you have any suggestions I would be grateful.
Thanks again
Ok, I think I would try to calculate this with a statistics software, for example with R (but I do not know if there is a special module available in R to calculate such a distance matrix, but I would expect it)
Allright, thanks very much for your suggestion
I did try to solve this with the least cost paths tool, but I ended up calculating the least cost path of each point to its "closest" one only, which is not what I need.