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How to create a heatmap

If you need to calculate the coverage or density of a particular feature of interest per unit area, heatmaps are for you!

Written by Karen Joyce

Who can use this feature

Editors of a project within a Professional or Pro + workspace.

Selection requirements for tool to work

A polygon layer OR

A category within a random forest classification layer

This tool lets you generate a grid-based heatmap showing how much of each block is covered by your selected feature. It’s perfect for highlighting patterns, identifying hotspots, or summarising spatial distribution at a glance. Choose your grid size and extent, and us do the heavy lifting! We'll return a grayscale raster where brighter areas indicate greater coverage.

For example, selecting a grid cell size of 100 metres creates 1-hectare blocks, allowing you to visualise what percentage of each hectare is covered by your feature.

  1. Select a polygon layer or a single category within a classification

  2. From the context menu at the top of the interface, click the create heatmap button. You can also access via analysis in the toolbox menu.

  3. Choose the extent of the heatmap. It will default to the extent of your input layer, but you can select another layer instead if you want your heatmap to cover a smaller or larger area. Optionally preview the grid size and extent.

  4. Click to run.

  5. Use the Inspect tool to assess the % coverage values within your output heatmap pixels.

In the short animation below, we have used a polygon prediction layer of dead trees, derived by https://deadtrees.earth/ using the drone mapping image that it overlays.

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