Enrich a layer

Available with Business Analyst license.

Enriching a layer appends business and demographic variables to your features to further analyze, model, and report on your data. You can enrich polygons using variables from different countries hosted in ArcGIS Online or from a local dataset. These datasets include demographics, such as age by race or by sex, population and housing characteristics, labor profiles, business locations, consumer spending, and market potential.

Note:

For more information on Business Analyst data, see Business Analyst data.

Data is available at multiple geographic scales, such as block groups, counties, states, and countries. Enrich Layer uses a proprietary apportionment methodology to more accurately estimate statistics at low levels of geography.

Potential applications

The following are potential applications of the Enrich Layer tool:

Application	Description	Examples of data used
Evaluate financial vulnerability	A local government wants to understand the areas in their city with the most financial vulnerability. They enrich a layer with variables that assess income, expenditures, and factors that negatively affect income. Then they use the enriched layer in a suitability analysis, ranking the areas most impacted by economic turbulence and designing interventions accordingly. To perform this analysis yourself, see the Evaluate COVID-19 financial vulnerability tutorial.	Median Household Income Median Disposable Income Per Capita Income HHs: Inc Below Poverty Level For full list, see tutorial linked at left.
Evaluate fire department service areas	A city fire department adds a point feature class representing fire stations in the city and creates drive-time areas around each one. They then enrich the layer with demographic and at-risk variables from the data browser, analyzing whether there are service gaps in high areas of growth and/or at-risk neighborhoods, furthering a case for new stations to be built more equitably throughout the city.	HHs: Inc Below Poverty Level HHs w/1+ Persons w/Disability Owner HHs with 0 Vehicles
Locate potential employees for job recruitment	A regional workforce development agency wants to find out where potential employees are located. Using CBSAs as the level of geography, they enrich a layer with variables that indicate willingness to commute to store locations and other educational attributes. Recruiting efforts can then be narrowed to the key geographies where candidates exist.	Workers 16+: Drove Alone Workers 16+: Long-distance/ Commuter Train Commute to Work: x-x Min variables Avg Commute to Work

Create an enriched layer

To enrich a feature layer, complete the following steps:

1. On the Analysis tab, in the Geoprocessing group, click Tools.

   The Geoprocessing pane appears.

2. On the Toolboxes tab, in the Business Analyst Tools section, expand the Analysis toolset and click Enrich Layer.

   The Enrich Layer tool opens in the Geoprocessing pane.

3. Choose the input features you want to enrich by doing one of the following:
   • Use the Input Features drop-down menu to choose a layer from the current map.
   • Click the Browse button to choose an existing feature class from other projects or folders.
   • Click the Draw button to draw features on the map.
4. Use the Output Feature Class parameter to set the name and location of the enriched layer created.
5. For Variables, click Add to open the data browser and add the variables you want to enrich the layer with.

   From the data browser, you can search and browse for data by category, from custom data, saved variable lists, and from data you have saved as favorites.

6. For point or line features, do the following:
   1. Use the Define areas to enrich drop-down menu to choose how the areas around the points or lines are defined. For example, you can choose Driving Time to set the area to be a specific drive time around each point.
   2. Enter the distance or time value for the area around the point or line.
   3. Use the Unit drop-down menu to choose a unit for the distance or time value.
7. Click Run to finish creating the enriched layer.

   Once the enriched layer is created, it is added to your project and can be used for further analysis and reporting. The enriched layer is a duplicate of the input layer with additional fields containing enriched attributes for each record.

Geoprocessing tool

This page describes the functionality of the Enrich Layer tool. You can also use this geoprocessing tool to build and run queries through a Python script or model. To learn more, see Enrich Layer in the ArcGIS Pro tool reference.