Omniscape.jl: Software to compute omnidirectional landscape connectivity

Abstract

Omniscape.jl is a software package that implements the Omniscape algorithm (McRae et al., 2016) to compute landscape connectivity. It is written in the Julia programming language (Bezanson et al., 2017) to be fast, scalable, and easy-to-use. Circuitscape.jl (Anantharaman et al., 2020), the package on which Omniscape.jl builds and expands, abstracts landscapes as two-dimensional electrical networks and solves for current flow. The current flow that results represents landscape connectivity. Omniscape.jl is novel in that it produces maps of “omni-directional” connectivity, which provide a spatial representation of connectivity between every possible pair of start and endpoints in the landscape. These maps can be used by researchers and landscape managers to understand and predict how ecological processes (e.g., animal movement, disease transmission, gene flow, and fire behavior) are likely to manifest in geographic space. Omniscape.jl makes use of Julia’s native multi-threading, making it readily scalable and deployable to high performance compute nodes. More information on the broader Circuitscape project, which is home to Circuitscape.jl and Omniscape.jl, can be found at circuitscape.org.