Which tool is used to find features within a specified distance?

The tool used to find features within a specified distance is the Buffer tool. This tool creates a zone around a specified feature or set of features, essentially creating a new polygon that represents all the areas within the defined distance from the original feature. This is useful in many analyses, such as identifying areas that may be impacted by a certain point (like a pollutant source) or determining proximity to resources (such as schools or hospitals).

For example, if you have a point feature representing a fire station and you want to find all buildings that are within a 500-meter radius, you would use the Buffer tool to create a 500-meter buffer zone around the fire station. Afterwards, you can easily analyze which buildings intersect with this buffer zone.

The other tools serve different purposes: Select Layer By Location focuses on selecting features based on their spatial relationships but does not create new areas, Clip is used to extract features based on the geometry of another layer, and Merge combines multiple features into a single feature but does not account for distance.