An overview of the Sampling toolset

The Sampling toolset provides tools that create features used either as sampling locations or as aggregation areas. For example, the Generate Tessellation tool creates a mesh of triangle, square, or hexagon polygons within an extent that can be used to aggregate other data. The Create Random Points tool creates points that can be used as sampling locations within the extent of a dataset.

Tools in the Sampling toolset

Tool	Description
Create Fishnet	Creates a fishnet of rectangular cells. The output can be polyline or polygon features.
Create Random Points	Creates a specified number of random point features. Random points can be generated in an extent window, inside polygon features, on point features, or along line features.
Generate Points Along Lines	Creates point features along lines or polygons at fixed intervals or by percentage of a feature's length.
Generate Rectangles Along Lines	Creates a series of rectangular polygons that follow a single linear feature or a group of linear features.
Generate Tessellation	Generates a tessellated grid of regular polygon features to cover a given extent. The tessellation can be of triangles, squares, diamonds, hexagons, H3 hexagons, or transverse hexagons.
Generate Transects Along Lines	Creates perpendicular transect lines at a regular interval along lines.