Use the drawing tool to define your area of interest.
Only buildings and uploaded polygons that fall entirely within the bounding box will be used in the analysis. For best results, draw a slightly larger area to avoid excluding features along the edges.
To measure the narrowest width between impermeable features, you can upload a polygon shapefile, include Microsoft Building Footprints (available within the Western United States), or use both together in the analysis.
When both are selected, the tool calculates distances between all features from both datasets.
Upon running the calculation tool, a 30x30m grid will appear over your study area.
Each grid cell is assigned the shortest straight-line distance between any two buildings that intersects it.
This represents the narrowest width of development across the landscape.
This can take several minutes to run depending on the size of the study extent, please do not close your browser.
Update the input values and color symbology to observe the gradients of avoidance across the study area. Likewise, leave spaces blank if you are only interested in one specific threshold of width.
| Layer | Exclusive Avoidance | Strong Avoidance | Moderate Avoidance | Weak Avoidance | MBF Used | Shapefile Used | Toggle On/Off | Delete | Download |
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The Width Calculator is based on [insert paper DOI here], which quantified the degree to which four ungulate species avoided the narrowness between buildings in the western US. Animals had a a gradient of avoidance to narrow spaces, where avoidance weakened as the space between buildings got wider. Our application is based on the subjective categories used in the paper, which differentiated between four degrees of avoidance: