the CRS of a Map View
Included in this tutorial:
Default settings for a map view’s coordinate reference system
Checking the current map view’s CRS
Changing the current map view’s CRS
Software version in examples: ArcGIS Pro 2.8.0
Tutorial Data: This tutorial uses the 1:50m Admin 0 - Countries shapefile downloaded from Natural Earth.
Natural Earth. “Admin 0 - Countries.” [shapefile]. 1:50m Cultural Vectors, version 4.1.0. 25 May 2018. Accessed 28 June 2021 from https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/50m-cultural-vectors/
Credits: L. Meisterlin with Erik Strand, Moses Levich, and Thiago Lee (2021)
This tutorial demonstrates tools for accessing and changing the projections and coordinate systems of vector and raster layers and data frames (map views) in ArcGIS Pro.
Map View Coordinate Reference Systems: Defaults
Map Views in ArcGIS Pro take on the Coordinate Reference system (CRS) of the first layer added to them. In our demonstration example, “Admin 0 - Countries” has been added to an empty map view.
Checking the Current Map View CRS
The CRS of the map view is described under “Current XY” in the Map Properties dialogue box’s Coordinate Systems tab.
To access it, open the Map Properties dialogue box by right-clicking on the name of the map view in the Contents Pane (the default map is called “Map”) and clicking through Properties > Coordinate Systems (tab).
checking the CRS of a Map View
The Countries dataset originally uses the WGS84 CRS (unprojected), so this is also the original CRS of the data frame.
Setting or Changing the Map View CRS
To set (i.e., change) the CRS of the current map view, access the Map Properties dialogue box by right-clicking on the name of the map view in the Contents Pane and clicking through Properties > Coordinate Systems (tab).
Find a specific CRS by navigating through the folders or by using the search bar. This example demonstrates changing the map view CRS to the Winkel Tripel projection (applied to the WGS1984 datum), located under Projected Coordinate Systems > World.
Layers within the map view are reprojected “on-the-fly” when the map’s CRS is changed. (The underlying datasets are not reprojected.)
setting a new CRS for a Map View