Welcome to the Distance project website

The Distance project provides software for the design and analysis of distance sampling surveys of wildlife populations. This software takes two forms: a Windows-based program and a suite of packages for the statistical programming language R.

Photos of a polar bear, grouse and lizard, taken by Tiago Marques (bear/lizard) and Steve Buckland (grouse)

News

Introductory workshop 04-15 March 2024

22 January 2024

Registration now open for the March 2024 introductory distance sampling workshop. Registration deadline is 21 February 2024. In addition, the widening participation scholarship application period closes 24 January 2024.


Introductory workshop 04-15 March 2024

16 January 2024

Accepting widening participation scholarship applications now; General registration open 22 January 2024


New CRAN release of mrds and Distance packages

04 January 2024

We announce the release of mrds 2.3.0 and Distance 1.0.9 on CRAN. An important update is that the default encounter rate variance estimator for point transect surveys has now been changed from the ‘P3’ estimator to the ‘P2’ estimator. Please follow link for further details.


Introductory workshop 09-20 October 2023

14 August 2023

Registration deadline approaching fast


New versions of Distance and mrds packages

03 August 2023

We are pleased to announce the release of new versions of our R packages Distance and mrds. The new release adds the ability to fit detection functions (CDS and MCDS) using the same optimizer used by Distance for Windows.


Design workshop registration open

02 August 2023

Registration is open for our online workshop on “Practical design and simulation to optimise distance sampling surveys”, to be taught from 28th - 31st August 2023.


Introductory workshop 10-21 July 2023

11 May 2023

Accepting widening participation scholarship applications now; General registration open 23 May 2023


Introductory workshop 20-31 March 2023

27 January 2023

Accepting widening participation scholarship applications now closed


Design and Simulation R packages

12 January 2023

We would like to make you aware that our design and simulation packages (dssd and dsims) are temporarily only available from our development repository on github. Please follow link for instructions on installing them.


New versions of R packages

16 November 2022

We are pleased to announce the imminent release of new versions of our R packages Distance and mrds. The information below will be particularly relevant to users of dht2. We recommend all users of these packages update to the newest versions.


Old news entries