Development of a new and open approach to dissolve polygons storing count data based on areal threshold

While many analyses require smart and flexible aggregation of adjacent and complex polygons storing quantitative data, currently available tools do not meet this need. In this work we present the ‘SmartDissolve v1.0’ toolbox for ArcGIS (Esri) and MATLAB, a new approach and tool that handles minimum mapping unit, resolution mismatch between layers, or spatial uncertainty problems in GISc. This tool automatically dissolves polygons below a threshold area, updating fields’ values. The toolbox allows to select the ordering of polygon analysis (i.e. from the smallest to the biggest area, vice versa, or order of IDs), different dissolve rules (i.e. with smallest, largest, or maximum-border-share adjacent polygon, minimum total perimeter or maximum compactness) and different field updating operations (i.e. sum, mean or text concatenation). The approach is illustrated by combining raster-based population data from LandScan with vector administrative units to capture the ‘ambient population’ of a set of municipalities in Naples, Italy.