Wildlife and Forestry Tools for ArcGIS Pro
Wildlife and Forestry Tools is a free add-in for ArcGIS Pro offering a large collection of analytical, cartographic and data-management tools for wildlife research, landscape analysis and general GIS work — ported and modernized from over three decades of Jenness Enterprises extensions for ArcView 3.x and ArcMap, and updated to include newer variations and advancements in the methods published in the literature. All methods are cited and sourced. Every tool runs at every ArcGIS Pro license level, with no extension licenses required.
Free does not mean lightweight or of little value! These tools do things that no standard tool in ArcGIS Pro does: local convex hull home ranges, aspect statistics computed in circular space, the largest circle, rectangle or ellipse that fits inside a polygon, the whole CorridorDesigner workflow from habitat model to bottleneck analysis, the Swiss hillshade family, and many more. Each tool carries its help and its references with it, and the geoprocessing tools run from the Geoprocessing pane, ModelBuilder and Python alike. All tools that generate data also generate extensive metadata defining the dataset itself, parameters set by the user, attribute field definitions and more. Building the add-in took me roughly 800 hours, and I began with the research already read and most of the algorithms already written for the earlier ArcView and ArcMap versions of these tools; an organization setting out to build the same set in-house should expect to spend at least that long. What you download is that work, finished, tested and ready to use.
Why give it away? Because of Lois Engelman, my wife, best friend and partner of 36 years. Lois and I ran Jenness Enterprises together from 2000 until she died in July 2026, and the Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund at Northern Arizona University was created in her name to support the next generation of forestry, wildlife and ecology students. The add-in is free so that it reaches as many people as it can, and my goal is to raise money for that fund: my belief is that people who try these tools will see their value, and will consider a donation toward something that will help develop the next generation of foresters, wildlife biologists, ecologists and land managers. All donations made toward this fund are fully tax-deductible and donated directly to the Northern Arizona University Foundation. About the award, and how to donate.
The toolsets
Home Range
Local Convex Hull (LoCoH) home ranges, enhanced kernel density with probability contours, and the Mahalanobis habitat-similarity family.
Topographic Analysis
Roughness and ruggedness (surface area, VRM, ACR, TRI, fractal dimension), TPI landforms, aspect statistics done correctly in circular space, topographic wetness index, and more.
Corridor Designer Tools
The complete CorridorDesigner workflow — habitat suitability modeling, land facet corridors, corridor building and evaluation — by Jenness, Majka, Brost and Beier.
Ecological Analysis
Classification accuracy assessment (Kappa and the modern estimators), comparisons among accuracy analyses, and sample-size planning — the first members of a growing set of ecological analysis tools.
Geometric Tools
Voronoi polygons, repeating shapes, random points and arrays, centerlines, fetch, concave hulls, maximum inscribed geometry and other computational-geometry workhorses — and the crop plot design tools (Plot Designer, Fuse Plots and Field, Create Array along Axes) ported from CropCentric.
Data Tools
Favorite datasets loaded in cartographic order, token-driven attribute summary reports, random record selection, unit conversion, and random numbers for any field.
Terrain Graphs
Polar plots for directional data and slope graphics, with statistics computed in the proper angular space.
Cartography
Five hillshade variations for beautiful terrain rendering, compass roses and north arrows, graphic backgrounds, shadowing effects, point-coordinate callouts and other cartographic helpers.
GIS Concepts
Short, illustrated pages on the general GIS ideas the tools lean on — starting with why the resampling method matters when you project a raster, and growing as the tutorials call for more.
Take a Break
A thought for the day, Sudoku, a sliding puzzle built from your own map, and a little ArcMap nostalgia.
Sources Cited
Every reference behind the tools in one numbered, alphabetical list, in Journal of Wildlife Management style, with a note of which pages cite each source: Sources Cited in the Tools.
Getting the add-in
Wildlife and Forestry Tools is developed and distributed by Jenness Enterprises, an Esri business partner since 2000. As ArcGIS Pro grows, the add-in is recompiled to match — pick the row below for the version of ArcGIS Pro you are running:
| ArcGIS Pro Version | Wildlife and Forestry Tools Version | Date Published | Click to Download | Downloads So Far | Source Code |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.7 and newer | 1.113.62.1 | October 17, 2026 | Download WildlifeTools.esriAddinX | see GitHub | Source code on GitHub |
Close ArcGIS Pro, then install by double-clicking the downloaded
.esriAddinX file; the next time Pro starts, the tools appear
on the Wildlife and Forestry ribbon tab, and every geoprocessing
tool is equally available in ModelBuilder and Python. The package is
digitally signed by Jenness Enterprises.
The add-in is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. To download its source code, click Source code on GitHub in the table above; the page that opens is the newest release, and under Assets, Source code (zip) downloads the code for that version of the add-in. Every earlier release and the release notes are on the releases page, and the code as it is being developed is in the Wildlife_Tools repository.
The tools in this version
These are the tools in version 1.113.62.1 of Wildlife and Forestry Tools, listed by the groups and menus of the Wildlife and Forestry ribbon tab. Every tool is available through its ribbon icon. Click a tool's name to open its help page.
All tools with this icon are also
available through the Geoprocessing pane, Python scripting and
ModelBuilder.
Home Range
Local Convex Hulls
Read more: About LoCoH
Estimates a home range and utilization distribution by the Standard (fixed-k) Local Convex Hull method, each local hull built from a point and its k − 1 nearest neighbors.
Estimates a home range by the Adaptive (a) Local Convex Hull method, adding neighbors nearest-first until their summed distances reach a distance budget.
Estimates a home range by the fixed-sphere (r) Local Convex Hull method, each local hull built from every point within a radius r of the focal point.
An interactive window that sweeps a LoCoH parameter across a range of values and charts the isopleth areas against it, to help choose the value by the leveling-off rule.
Kernel Density Tools
Read more: About Kernel Density
Creates a kernel density surface from points, matching Esri's Kernel Density tool at its defaults and adding seven kernel shapes, a planar or geodesic distance choice, and three kinds of output value including a 'Proportion under the curve' output.
Converts a kernel density raster into a proportion-under-the-surface raster, the consistent currency for home ranges and core areas.
Draws home-range probability isopleths from a kernel density surface, from 5% to 100% in 5% steps, as contour lines, polygons or both.
Mahalanobis Tools
Read more: About Mahalanobis
Creates a raster of Mahalanobis distances showing how far every cell's combination of landscape values lies from a multivariate reference, with low values marking the most similar ground.
Calculates a Mahalanobis distance at each input point, scoring how typical each location is of a multivariate reference sample.
Computes the mean vector and the covariance, inverse covariance and correlation matrices of a set of landscape variables and writes them as tables for the other Mahalanobis tools.
Transforms a Mahalanobis squared-distance raster into a chi-square p-value raster, a 0 to 1 similarity score that is comparable across analyses.
Topographic Analysis
Topographic Roughness
Read more: About Topographic Roughness
Calculates the true three-dimensional surface area, the surface ratio and the flat area of every cell of a DEM by the eight-triangle method of Jenness (2004).
Computes the Vector Ruggedness Measure of Sappington et al. (2007): how much the directions the terrain faces vary within a neighborhood, independent of slope.
Computes the Arc-Chord Ratio of Du Preez (2015), each cell's surface area divided by the area of its plane of best fit, so that a smooth slope of any steepness scores 1.
Computes a Terrain Ruggedness Index for every cell of a DEM, with a choice of four measures of how much the elevations in a circular neighborhood depart from flat.
Computes the local fractal dimension of a DEM in a moving window, from 2 for a smooth surface to 3 for one so convoluted that it fills space.
Computes the Land Surface Ruggedness Index of Beasom et al. (1983) from a DEM: the total length of contour line within a circular neighborhood of every cell.
Computes the Land Surface Ruggedness Index from contour lines, or any polylines, you already have: the length of line within a circular neighborhood of every cell.
Adds fields describing the topography along each polyline: ground length, climb and descent, slope, heading, meander and convolution, up to 36 measures in all.
Splits each polyline into one three-dimensional feature per straight segment, carrying the per-segment slope, bearing, turning angle and other attributes you choose.
Wetness, Slope and Extreme Values
Computes the Topographic Wetness Index of Beven and Kirkby (1979) for every cell of a DEM, combining upslope catchment area and local slope to show where water collects.
Summarizes a slope raster within zones as a table with one row per zone: cell count, mean, median, standard deviation, range, percentiles and the 95% confidence interval of the mean slope.
Adds the slope at each point, from a slope raster or straight from a DEM, to a copy of the point feature class or to the input itself, interpolating percent slopes on their angles so that steep cells never bias the result.
Finds the local peaks and low points of any raster surface and writes each one as a point; on a DEM those are the summits and the sinks.
TPI Tools
Read more: About TPI
Computes the Topographic Position Index of a DEM, each cell's elevation minus the mean elevation of its neighborhood: positive on ridges, negative in valleys, near zero on flats.
Classifies a DEM into slope-position classes such as valley bottom, mid-slope, flat and ridge from a Topographic Position Index and slope, using a saved classification system.
Classifies a DEM into landforms such as canyons, drainages, plains, open slopes, ridges and mountain tops from two Topographic Position Indices and slope.
Classifies any single-band raster into named, colored categories using a saved classification system of thresholds on its values or their z-scores.
Creates, edits, duplicates and deletes the reusable classification systems that the Slope Position, Landform and General Raster Classification tools apply.
An interactive window for choosing a TPI neighborhood size by watching how a feature you know on a snapshot of your DEM is classified as you move the sliders.
Aspect Tools
Read more: About Aspect
Computes neighborhood statistics of an aspect raster with circular statistics, so that 359° and 1° are two degrees apart rather than 358.
Adds the aspect at each point, from an aspect raster or straight from a DEM, to a copy of the point feature class or to the input itself, with an optional interpolation that is a weighted mean direction.
Generates directional reclassifications and trigonometric transforms of an aspect raster, such as northness, eastness and the deviation from a chosen bearing.
Summarizes an aspect raster within zones as a table of circular statistics: mean direction, resultant length, circular variance, the Rayleigh test and more.
Corridor Designer Tools
Habitat Suitability Modeling
Read more: About Corridor Design · Corridor Design Tutorial
A window for turning a species expert's suitability scores for each habitat factor into the remap tables that Create Habitat Suitability Model reads.
Builds a habitat suitability model, a raster scoring every cell from 0 to 100 for a species, from habitat factor rasters and their remap tables.
Combines habitat factor rasters already scored on the 0–100 scale into one habitat suitability model by a weighted geometric or additive mean.
Stretches a habitat model built elsewhere, on any consistent scale, onto the 0–100 suitability scale the Corridor Designer chain expects.
Assigns a fixed suitability score to every cell of a habitat suitability model that falls inside your polygon features, such as a new subdivision or restored land.
Rescales a habitat suitability model by distance from a resource the species must stay near, such as escape terrain or perennial water.
Turns a habitat suitability model into habitat patch polygons, each classed by its geodesic area as too small, a breeding patch or a population patch.
Land Facet Corridor Modeling
Read more: About Land Facets · Land Facet Tutorial
Defines land facets, landscape units of enduring topography and soils, by clustering the topographic and soil variables you choose.
Computes, for every facet in a land facet raster, the proportion of the surrounding neighborhood made of that facet, as one band per facet of a single raster.
Builds one Mahalanobis distance cost surface per land facet, measuring how far every cell departs from the conditions typical of that facet.
Build and Modify Corridors
Finds the corridor termini within each wildland block: the concentrations of good ground on a habitat or land facet surface that least-cost corridors will run between.
Builds least-cost corridor polygons between every pair of wildland blocks at a series of percentile widths, with no Spatial Analyst extension needed.
Closes interior holes smaller than a geodesic area threshold in polygon feature classes, leaving larger holes as real gaps.
Unions any number of polygon feature classes into one dissolved shape, turning single-species corridors into a preliminary linkage design.
Evaluate Corridors
Read more: Corridor Evaluation Tutorial
Finds the route through a corridor that minimizes the gaps between habitat patches, and reports the largest gap the species must cross between each pair of termini.
Finds the route through a corridor polygon with the widest bottleneck and measures the corridor width at regular stations along it.
Summarizes numeric fields of a polyline or polygon feature class both as plain record statistics and weighted by geodesic length or area.
An interactive window drawing histograms, with statistics and kernel-density overlays, of attribute fields, raster values or categorical data from one or several datasets at once.
Ancillary Corridor Tools
Measures the diversity of a categorical raster within a moving neighborhood of each cell: Hill numbers (the effective number of species), Shannon's index, the Gini-Simpson index or Simpson's concentration.
Turns a raster where high values mean good into a cost surface where that ground is cheap to cross, by a reciprocal or a linear method.
Clips any mix of rasters and feature classes to an analysis area polygon in one run, optionally projecting every output to one coordinate system.
A window that builds a cross-tabulation table showing how much of the landscape falls in each joint range of two variables, from fields, polygon layers or rasters.
Stacks any mix of polygon layers and rasters into one integer raster whose cell value counts how many of them occur on that cell.
Analysis Report
A read-only window that reads the analysis records stamped on Corridor Designer outputs and reports, in plain language, where each dataset came from.
Ecological Analysis
Kappa Tools
Read more: About Kappa Analysis · Kappa Tutorial
Assesses a classification against reference classes: the error matrix, Cohen's Kappa with its variance and test, per-class accuracies, and the area-weighted estimators of Olofsson et al. (2014).
Compares the Kappa statistics of two or more accuracy analyses with Z tests and the Fleiss common-kappa test, from each analysis's kappa and variance alone.
Estimates the reference sample size an accuracy assessment needs, by four methods ordered by how much you already know about the class proportions.
Geometric Tools
Tessellations
Builds Voronoi (Thiessen) polygons around points, optionally clipped to a boundary, and exactly on the sphere for latitude-longitude data.
Subdivides a boundary polygon into compact, nearly equal-area Voronoi cells by moving each seed point to its cell's centroid until the cells settle.
Tessellates an area with hexagons, squares, triangles or rectangles, or lays out sampling points or circles, at any size in real units and any orientation.
Random Samples
Generates uniform random points in polygons, along polylines, in raster categories or in an extent, with optional minimum separations between points and from the boundary.
Generates randomly placed arrays of sampling points, such as grids, triangular lattices and circles of stations, inside polygons, along polylines or in raster categories.
Selects a spatially balanced probability sample from a point, polyline or polygon frame by the GRTS design of Stevens and Olsen (2004).
Geometry on Geometry
Collapses polygons such as rivers and corridors to their centerlines, carrying the minimum, mean and maximum width along every line.
Finds the longest straight line that fits inside each polygon, the fetch of a body of water, or casts directional fetch rays from station points.
Generates evenly spaced lines radiating from every input point, optionally stopped by barrier features, and the points at their origins and ends.
Finds the largest circle, rectangle, convex polygon or ellipse that fits entirely inside each polygon, with interior holes acting as barriers.
Builds the concave hull of a cloud of points by chi shapes, alpha shapes or the k-nearest-neighbors method, with one concavity setting.
Orders a set of points into a short travel route, as a simple path, a round trip or a route between fixed ends, and writes the route and the numbered stops.
Crop Plot Design Tools (CropCentric)
Lays out a block of rectangular research plots from an anchor point and a direction you draw on the map, and repeats it for every replication with the rates in a fresh random order.
Combines a field polygon and research-plot polygons into one feature class in which every piece of ground carries exactly one treatment rate.
Copies a selected graphic or selected features along one axis, and optionally a second, with a separation distance between the copies.
Data Tools
Keeps your most-used datasets in four lists that you name yourself and adds any combination of them to the active map with one click.
Counts the records holding each value of a field, works out each value's share of the total, and writes a report laid out the way you want it.
Selects a random sample of a layer's or table's records, so that chance rather than convenience picks the subset.
Converts values among more than 1,200 measurement units in 23 classes, from area and length to fireline intensity and stand basal area.
Converts every value of a numeric field from one unit to another, into a new field or in place; it is opened from the Unit Converter window or the Geoprocessing pane.
Fills a numeric field with a constant, a random permutation of 1 to N, random integers or decimals in a range, or draws from a normal distribution.
Terrain Graphs
Draws the distribution of a set of directions, from a field, from polylines or from an aspect raster, as a circular plot with its circular statistics.
Draws a quarter-circle picture of the slope in an area: the mean, a standard-deviation wedge, the full range, the median and the confidence interval of the mean.
Cartography
Hillshade Variations
Read more: About Hillshades
Computes a one-sun hillshade with the additions of the Swiss method: darkened lowlands, dimmed cast shadows, a chosen number of gray levels, and correct results on latitude-longitude DEMs.
Computes the Multi-Directional Oblique-Weighted hillshade of Mark (1992), blending four suns so that every slope is lit mostly by the suns that strike it obliquely.
Computes a hillshade as the weighted average of hillshades from two to eight suns, each at an azimuth, an inclination and a weight you choose.
Computes a softened hillshade by blurring the DEM before shading it or the hillshade afterward, with a radius in cells or in ground units.
Drapes a DEM in a transparent black-to-white stretch over an existing hillshade as a group layer, darkening the low country without writing a new dataset.
Graphic Backgrounds
Draws a circle behind the selected graphic or layout elements and groups the two, with the circle underneath.
Draws a rectangle, with square, rounded or capsule corners, behind the selected elements and groups the two, with the rectangle underneath.
Draws a polygon that traces the actual shape of the selected elements, optionally buffered, and groups it beneath them as a halo or a close-fitting panel.
Draws the minimum convex polygon around the selected elements, the outline a rubber band would take, and groups it beneath them.
Cartographic Helpers
Moves the Service Layer Credits text out of the map frame on a layout, with one click.
Builds concentric, increasingly transparent rings around polygons that read as a soft shadow or glow, with the controls of a drop shadow.
Changes the colors of the selected layout or map elements all at once, listing every color found in them by what it is used for.
Show Point Coordinates
Click a map or a map frame, and a callout graphic appears giving the point's latitude and longitude and, on a projected map, its X and Y, with the coordinate system names.
Chooses what the Point Coordinates callout contains and how it looks: the coordinate formats, decimal places, fonts, colors, callout style and marker.
Custom Graphics and North Arrows
Adds a picture to a map or a layout as a single graphic, chosen from a gallery of four compass designs and any images of your own that you have registered.
Adds a north arrow to a layout, drawn with a picture from the gallery; it is an ordinary ArcGIS Pro north arrow that turns with its map frame.
Registers your own images as graphics and north arrows for the two galleries, and sets each image's focal point.
Take a Break
Shows a quotation in a small card, for a pause in a long session.
A Sudoku puzzle in a window of its own that does not block ArcGIS Pro; every puzzle has exactly one solution.
Turns a snapshot of your own map or layout into a sliding-tile puzzle; every scramble can be solved.
Shows the easter egg hidden in early versions of ArcMap, a picture of Jerry Garcia, with its story.
Opens a card about the Lois Engelman Memorial Award Fund, with buttons to read about the award and to donate through NAU.
Opens a card about the add-in: what it is and what it is worth, the version you have installed and whether a newer one is available, a citation to copy, the license and the source code, and links to this Tool Reference and the award page.