Error reading file, Maxent 3.3

[Gaëlle]

Dear Maxent users,

Using Maxent 3.3 on a Mac, I have been trying to model the
distribution of 253 species in West Africa, using the 19 bioclim
layers of worldclim. I first tested some parameters on three species
chosen at random in my dataset and all went well. Then I ran my
complete dataset and I ran into a lot of different errors:

if I run Maxent on my whole dataset, I get this error:

Error reading file /Volumes/RAID Data/Gaelle/test/maxent.cache/
asc_bio9.mxe: java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string:
"laetum"
java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "laetum"

if I then remove the species in question (or the climatic layer), I
get an other error about an other species and so on.

If I run the model on only the species of the first error, I get this
message:
Error reading file /Volumes/RAID Data/Gaelle/test/maxent.cache/
asc_bio4.mxe: java.io.IOException: Not in GZIP format
java.io.IOException: Not in GZIP format

I am getting quite desperate and do not see where the problem could
be. I would be grateful of any help

Thanks a lot
Gaelle

[Gaëlle]

Hello again,

I tried again to run Maxent on only one of the species that made
problems and can Maxent only deal with a very restricted number of
species?

Thanks for your help!

Gaelle

[Gaëlle]

Okay, I found the problem:

my species file was written like that:

Genus1_species1
Genus1_species2
Genus1_species3
Genus2_species1
...

And it seems that Maxent was not able to read the underscore or did
not recognise it when running the model. I took the underscore away
and it works!

Gaelle

[Steven Phillips]

Hi all,

We've found the source of Gaelle's error - it involved underscores ("_")
in species names, in particular when modeling multiple species in the
same genus at the same time. The bug is fixed, and an updated version
will be installed on the Maxent download site before too long. In the
meanwhile, if anyone else has the same issue, you can get around it by
removing underscores from species names.

-- Steven

[nima...@hotmail.com]

Hi Steven, 

I've had similar problems with Maxent 3.3.3, though my "error reading file" message is a bit different from Gaelle's. I've got 75 species, and am also using the 19 bioclim layers + altitude - all from worldclim for the present climate and future projections. When I do the simulations for the future projections, I get the following error message: 

Error reading file: C:\Users\nimaraghu\Desktop\maxent results\HadGEM2_AO\Caseiroa_decandra_0_HadGEM2_AO bioclim var.asc row 246 column 4253: java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string "-99-9999"

I don't know if it's still a problem with having an "_" in the species name (which I can fix if it'll make the problem go away), but it doesn't seem to happen uniformly to all the species. Also, when it says "var.asc row 246 column 4253" - I don't have an ascii file called "var.asc", there's alt.asc and then biol1, biol2 etc. so I'm unable to figure out which files could have an error. 

Any clues would be really helpful! Thanks so much!

Nima

On Thursday, March 11, 2010 9:00:55 PM UTC+1, Steven wrote:

Hi all,

We've found the source of Gaelle's error - it involved underscores ("_")
in species names, in particular when modeling multiple species in the
same genus at the same time.  The bug is fixed, and an updated version
will be installed on the Maxent download site before too long.  In the
meanwhile, if anyone else has the same issue, you can get around it by
removing underscores from species names.

-- Steven