Training Resources

Condatis is decision support software to identify the best locations for habitat restoration to increase connectivity across landscapes. It can help planners to find multiple-win solutions for land management, so that biodiversity can recover and natural ecosystems can co-exist with human activities. Condatis’s metric of long-distance connectivity is particularly relevant under climate change, ensuring that networks of habitat facilitate range shifts. Condatis:

  1. Highlights pathways across a landscape that allow both dispersal and reproduction of species;
  2. Pinpoints bottlenecks in the habitat network, where there are restricted opportunities for colonisation, and where restoration would be most impactful;
  3. Ranks the feasible sites for habitat restoration, to efficiently enhance the existing habitat network.

Condatis has been developed since 2014 and has been used by conservation practitioners around the world, via its web application. Through collaboration with users, we have designed it to be fast and user-friendly, and to work with the kind of data that organisations typically have.

We have provided a general-purpose help document for all users. This can be found by launching the web app and clicking “help” in the top right hand corner.

Training in Condatis with practical exercises

We invite you to start with training resources from a workshop held in September 2025, including a brief overview of the software and two exercises showcasing the different functions of Condatis. The materials take approximately 3 hours to work through, although this may vary depending on your experience level. The first half of the workshop uses the Condatis web application, and the second half uses the open-source R software (so if you are only interested in the web application you can stop halfway through). The data for both exercises are included.

Please note that some familiarity with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is necessary to get your data into and out of Condatis. From different training events we and our partners have run over the years, we have collected some training resources that help with three different GIS platforms: ArcGIS, QGIS and R. We are not actively updating these, so please bear in mind that some aspects may become out of date, though you will probably still find useful tips here if you are stuck:

Condatis_gis3ways

download

In brief, the three resources are:

  • Slides guiding you through preparing demo data in ArcGIS.
  • A training R script by Sarah Scriven and Jenny Hodgson, which replicates most of the GIS steps with the same demo data.
  • A guide for creating Condatis-suitable rasters in QGIS, contributed by Andrew Stringer.

Video resources

Short overview of Condatis by Jenny Hodgson in 2024

This 10 minute long video by Jenny Hodgson introduces the Condatis project and illustrates how Condatis can support landscape decisions, explaining some key concepts like flow, speed, and bottlenecks.

Webinar by Katherine Allen explaining Condatis in 2020

This is a 45 minute webinar organised by CIEEM. It starts with background and rationale for the software (up to 10:30), then gives a detailed explanation of how the modelling works (10:30-19:30), then discusses several case studies of practitioners using Condatis for different purposes (19:30-28:30). Finally, there is some advice for getting started with Condatis, explaining what you need for running an analysis.

External resources which may be of use for preparing Raster maps for use in Condatis

(Condatis accepts no responsibility for the content of external websites)

Basic GIS Training courses
Creation of Raster Maps
Acquiring Data for Raster Mapping

Esri provides training events delivered in a number of formats and covering a wide range of GIS related subjects, some of which are provided free of charge. To view the full range of training offered by Esri click here.