PrepareRastersforMaxent

Maxent software (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/maxent) is frequently used for presence-only species distribution modeling. Maxent requires, however, that input ASCII raster files be aligned with one another and have the same spatial extent. This tool pre-processes raster data in preparation for Maxent modeling to ensure that all rasters have the same extent, same cell size, and aren't missing data. There are two version of this geoprocessing modeling. The advanced version is for the ArcGIS Advanced license. The basic version is the the ArcGIS Advanced license. Both versions require Spatial Analyst. The difference between the two is that the advanced version creates a polygon shapefile that shows the difference between the template raster and the processed raster. Ideally, this should generate a polygon with empty output, but if it doesn't you can use it to diagnose problems. The tool first resamples the raster, then uses a focalmean (3x3 and 5x5) to fill gaps, and mosaics the resampled, 3x3, and 5x5 rasters together, and converts to ASCII. Recommended citation format: Dilts, T.E. (2015) Prepare Rasters for Maxent Tool for ArcGIS 10.1. University of Nevada Reno. Available at: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=11bf7e689c92413f8d31933b3e1f56b1