Using soil raster data for species distribution models (.bil file type)

[Clarissa Crist]

Using coordinate data for plant species on Madagascar, I have modeled the predicted distribution of these plant species using bioclimate data in Maxent and ArcGIS. Now I am trying to model using the Harmonized World Soil Database.

The first issue I have is that the raster data comes in a compressed format tif.gz and I am not sure how to decompress or unzip this file properly. Here is where I got the the file: http://worldgrids.org/doku.php/wiki:stghws

I stumbled upon raster data for soil groups in a .bil file type, which is not something I am used to modeling: http://webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/External-World-soil-database/HWSD_Data/

I ran the models using this raster data by converting the data into .asc in ArcGIS and running them in Maxent. I got some weird results for the models, or at least results that I am not used to seeing. I attached a picture of the model. I'm not sure why the color scheme is so different. I'm not sure if I did something wrong in the process. I am going to try running the models again. 

Could someone provide insight into decompressing tif.gz files or how they run .bil file types or if my models seem to look alright?

Thank you!

[Jamie M. Kass]

Not sure exactly what the issue here is, but you can easily convert between raster formats in R with the "raster" package by loading them in with raster(), then saving them to file with writeRaster() and just specify the file extension you'd like in the filename (e.g. "raster1.asc").

Jamie

[Clarissa Crist]

Thank you for the help! :)