Least-Cost Path / Cost-Distance Analysis

Least-cost path analysis finds the route between two locations that minimizes accumulated travel cost across a landscape, rather than minimizing straight-line distance. By encoding terrain, slope, land cover, and other frictions into a cost surface and accumulating cost outward from a source, it identifies optimal corridors for roads, pipelines, trails, power lines, and wildlife movement — a core raster-GIS technique built on Dijkstra's shortest-path logic.