An overview of the Sampling toolset

The Sampling toolset contains tools that create features used as either sampling locations or 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.

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.
Create Spatially Balanced Points	Creates a set of sample points based on inclusion probabilities, resulting in a spatially balanced sample design. This tool is typically used for designing a monitoring network by suggesting locations to take samples, and a preference for particular locations can be defined using an inclusion probability raster.
Create Spatial Sampling Locations	Creates sample locations within a continuous study area using simple random, stratified, systematic (gridded), or cluster sampling designs.
Generate Points Along Lines	Creates point features along lines or polygons.
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.
Subset Features	Divides the records of a feature class or table into two subsets: one subset to be used as training data, and one subset to be used as test features to compare and validate the output surface.