Which GIS tool would be suitable for combining features based on their geographic location?

The appropriate choice for combining features based on their geographic location is indeed the tool that focuses on spatial relationships between different geographic entities. Select By Location allows users to identify and select features based on their spatial relationships to other features. This means users can select features that intersect, are within a certain distance from, or are contained within other features, among other spatial queries.

This tool is critical for tasks where location-based criteria are essential, such as identifying neighborhoods within a certain distance of schools, or finding all rivers that cross a proposed development area. In this way, Select By Location is specifically designed to leverage the geographic arrangement of data to achieve meaningful analyses.

Other options, such as Select By Attribute, focus on selecting features based on non-spatial attributes or fields in a dataset, which doesn’t incorporate location as a factor. Geocoding is the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates and does not inherently perform combinations of features based on their spatial arrangements. Lastly, the Buffer tool creates zones around features but does not directly facilitate the combination of features based on their location.