Circuitscape

Resistance layers describe how hard each cell of a landscape is to cross. Treated as an electrical circuit, the current flowing through them shows where movement concentrates, over all possible pathways at the same time.¹ Circuitscape was created by Brad McRae (1966-2017), Viral B. Shah, Tanmay Mohapatra and Ranjan Anantharaman.¹

It has three companion tools:

• Omniscape applies Circuitscape in a moving window for omni-directional connectivity.¹
• Linkage Mapper is an ArcGIS toolbox that maps corridors, pinch-points and barriers.^1,2
• Gnarly Landscape Utilities builds the core-area and resistance layers the others need.^1,2

The project lists its uses as wildlife corridor design, landscape genetics (how landscape features shape gene flow between populations), movement ecology, connectivity under climate change, infectious disease, fire and agriculture.¹ Circuitscape received The Wildlife Society's Spatial Ecology and Telemetry Working Group award in 2013.¹

Circuitscape 5 is written in Julia, a programming language for scientific computing, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.² Users install it as a Julia package (Pkg.add("Circuitscape"), Julia 1.12 or later) and drive it with INI configuration files.³ It reads ESRI ASCII grids and, with ArchGDAL, GeoTIFF.³ The code is on GitHub under the MIT licence,^2,3 and the project is looking for new contributors and maintainers.² The earlier Python version, Circuitscape 4, is archived, but its installers and ArcGIS toolboxes remain downloadable.² NASA and The Nature Conservancy funded version 5; the Wilburforce Foundation funded version 4.¹