problem with maxnet.predictRaster in ENMeval for categorical variables -- please use new version

[Jamie M. Kass]

All,

I recently discovered a problem with the maxnet.predictRaster function in ENMeval, so I fixed it in v2.0.5.2, now on CRAN -- please update your version.

The problem was that the function was ignoring categorical features when making predictions. This is because the matrix output by terra::values (and by extension, raster::values that previous versions of 2.0.0 used), was converting factor values to numeric, and maxnet.predict was ignoring them. This is not an issue for maxent.jar because it converts factor values to numeric internally anyway. This is fixed in v2.0.5.2 by using as.data.frame instead to get the raster values (which preserves the factor values).

Please be aware that this function was used to create the rasters in "e@predictions" (if e is your ENMevaluation object), so if you used categorical variables to fit the maxnet model, the raster is likely missing their contribution.

My sincerest apologies about this bug, but this happens sometimes with open software (especially when mainly one person is managing it!). Thanks for your support and use of ENMeval.

-Jamie