Welcome to the Distance project website

Photo by Simon Greenwood on Unsplash

The Distance project provides free 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 R packages. This site is hosted by the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews.

Download Distance for Windows Distance R Packages

Recent news

Design workshop, March 2025
Registration now open design workshop; closes 28Feb25.
Len Thomas
03 Jan 2025

Introductory workshop, February 2025
Registration now open introductory workshop; closes 28Jan25.
Eric Rexstad
20 Nov 2024

Two upcoming webinars of interest to distance samplers
February webinar on CTDS analysis and May webinar on ecological applications
Rexstad
07 Nov 2024

New CRAN release of mrds and Distance R packages
Announcing new major releases of the mrds package, version 3.0.0, and Distance package, version 2.0.0.
Len Thomas
05 Nov 2024
 
New CRAN release of mrds and Distance packages
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…
Laura Marshall
04 Jan 2024
 
New versions of Distance and mrds packages
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)…
Len Thomas
03 Aug 2023
 
Design and Simulation R packages
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.
Len Thomas
12 Jan 2023
 
New versions of R packages
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…
Laura Marshall
16 Nov 2022
 
Release of Distance 7.5
Release of a new version of Distance for Windows, Distance 7.5. This version upgrades to use 64 bit R and also contains new versions of our R packages which are also now on…
Laura Marshall
07 Sep 2022
 
Distance for Windows and R 4.2
Users of Distance for Windows who make use of the analysis engines that call R - that is the MRDS, DSM and MA analysis engines. Distance for Windows currently is not…
Len Thomas
06 Jun 2022
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