Installing the stand-alone version of ENMTools under Ubuntu Linux

[Josh]

Dear everyone,

I have developed a video tutorial to install the stand-alone Perl-based version of ENMTools under Ubuntu Linux. But first, a little background.

I have encountered some problems running hypothesis-testing with the R-based version of ENMTools. I believe this has to do with the architecture of R itself. Specifically, R tends to keep everything it's working on in a big blob of RAM that quickly maxes out the memory. This problem manifests itself with ENMTools, where using even just a few moderately-sized (50M) raster files causes even well-provisioned machines (e.g., in my case, 128GB of RAM) to run out of RAM and fail to complete. Everything works fine with smaller rasters, though.

I find that the stand-alone version of ENMTools works fine in these situations. The problem is that I am a Mac and Linux user with no access to Windows machines. The steps to install the auxiliary software on a Unix architecture machine, like Mac or Linux, which are needed to run the stand-alone ENMTools, are not straightforward.

This is where my tutorial comes in. I wrote this tutorial for Ubuntu Linux, but it should be adaptable to a Mac architecture as well (although I find installing packages through the terminal on Macs to be very unpleasant and messy and inconsistent).

https://youtu.be/Mj3jo10bM1k

I hope that some of you find this helpful.

-Josh Banta