This tools estimates the area of each category, polygon, or patch in an input raster. The input raster must be categorical in data scale. Rasters with floating-point cell values are not good candidates for an area analysis. The user must specify whether the output is given in grid cells or map units (units). Map Units are physical units, e.g. if the rasters's scale is in metres, areas will report in square-metres. Notice that square-metres can be converted into hectares by dividing by 10,000 and into square-kilometres by dividing by 1,000,000. If the input raster is in geographic coordinates (i.e. latitude and longitude) a warning will be issued and areas will be estimated based on per-row calculated degree lengths.

The tool can be run with a raster output (output), a text output (out_text), or both. If niether outputs are specified, the tool will automatically output a raster named area.tif.

Zero values in the input raster may be excluded from the area analysis if the zero_back flag is used.

To calculate the area of vector polygons, use the polygon_area tool instead.

See Also

polygon_area, raster_histogram

Function Signature

def raster_area(self, raster: Raster, units: str = "map units", zero_background: bool = False) -> Tuple[Raster, str]: ...

Project Links

WbW Homepage User Manual Support WbW