Welcome to the Circuitscape Project!

Circuitscape is a free, open-source program which borrows algorithms from electronic circuit theory to predict patterns of movement, gene flow, and genetic differentiation among plant and animal populations in heterogeneous landscapes. Circuit theory complements least-cost path approaches because it considers effects of all possible pathways across a landscape simultaneously. We are developing Circuitscape for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

See the menu bar above for downloads, user guide, publications, etc.

Acknowledgements

We are especially grateful to the Wilburforce Foundation and the Cougar Fund for funding this work. We also wish to thank the Washington Program of The Nature Conservancy and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for supporting Brad McRae and Interactive Supercomputing and the University of California, Santa Barbara for supporting Viral Shah while they collaborated on the project.

What’s New

Check out the new Export from ArcGIS tool by Jeff Jenness. It lets you easily convert rasters or shapefiles to ASCII grid format for use with Circuitscape. Automatically converts all files to the same projection, cell size, and extent.

Version 3.5 is here. This includes new features and much faster code for landscape genetic applications (pairwise resistance calculations with focal points and no mapping). We’ve also solved the bug that caused crashes on some Windows machines.

Authors

Circuitscape was written by Brad McRae and Viral Shah. More details about the authors here.