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I am looking for a way to quickly measure the distance covered of GPS tracks of foraging Seabirds. A tool that could give accumulative distance of point to point from the long and lat coordinates would be ideal.

I have tried a few different tools in the distance toolbox but they don't seem to measure continuous distance from point to point more from a single source. And the Hawth's tools is not supported on arcmap 10.1, (http://www.spatialecology.com/htools/pntdistmatrix.php) which sheds some light on potential tools.

Thanks in Advanceenter image description here

Foraging trip of Tropical Seabird on the coast of Northern Australia

Mr Angus
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    Have you considered converting the points to a line, in a geodatabase the distance would be automatically calculated and then something like route events to put the 'chainage' back onto the points for cumulative distance? See http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6476/finding-distance-of-point-along-polyline – Michael Stimson Sep 07 '14 at 23:59
  • Would you be able to edit your question to include a few more details like a screenshot of some rows from your point attribute table (which I am guessing will include a track ID and order), the projected coordinate system that you wish to measure your distances in, and to clarify that it is 10.1 you wish to use (you have a 10.0 tag), please? – PolyGeo Sep 08 '14 at 00:19

2 Answers2

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Use the Points to Line tool. http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//00170000003s000000

You could use a datestamp for the sort field, if the default doesn't work the first time.

The shape length of the line should be included in the output feature class, if it is in a geodatabase.

You might want to check the length by adding a field to the output table, right-clicking it and do Calculate Geometry, and calculate the geodesic length.

KiloGeo
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I used Michael Miles-Stimson answer and converted it to a line (points to line), then i just used the measurement tool and clicked on feature and it calculated it.

thanks enter image description here

Mr Angus
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