New version of Connectivity Analysis Toolkit software released

[carlos]

The Connectivity Analysis Toolkit is a software interface that provides conservation planners with tools for both linkage mapping and landscape-level 'centrality' analysis. 450 people from around the world have downloaded the CAT since it became available in 2010.

We have just released Version 1.2 with the following changes:

• Approximate shortest-path betweenness centrality allows faster computation of this metric

• Approximate current flow betweenness centrality allows faster computation of this metric; function also uses sparse matrices for lower RAM requirements

• Network flow functions updated to LEMON version 1.2.2

• Updates to manual and tutorial dataset

These are major updates which speed computation in some cases by an order of magnitude. Thanks to Aric Hagberg for his work adding these new functions to NetworkX and thus making them available for the CAT.

The software is freely available at www.connectivitytools.org