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

Introductory workshop, May 2025

Registration now open introductory workshop; closes 23Apr25.

Design workshop, March 2025

Registration now open design workshop; closes 28Feb25.

Two upcoming webinars of interest to distance samplers

February webinar on CTDS analysis and May webinar on ecological applications

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.

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...

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)...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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