[R-sig-Geo] new RSAGA release (update recommended)

[Alexander Brenning]

Dear list,

a new release of RSAGA (version 0.92-2) is available on CRAN. It comes 
with several small but important updates and improvements, which is why 
I encourage RSAGA users to update to this latest release, and why I 
provide this short summary of changes. RSAGA integrates SAGA GIS into R, 
see http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSAGA/index.html

This new release supports SAGA GIS versions 2.0.4 to 2.0.7 (previous 
RSAGA versions had trouble with recent changes in names of SAGA module 
arguments). It performs a version check and provides error/warning 
messages if necessary. Some minor adjustment have also been made that 
will make RSAGA run smoother on unix systems.

If you use RSAGA to apply fitted models to stacks of grids with 
predictor variables, this can now be done much faster with the new 
multi.local.function instead of the much more general 
multi.focal.function. On a test data set, the application of a GAM to a 
couple of nonlinear predictor variables ended up being 162 times faster 
with the new multi.local.function than in the multi.focal.function 
implementation (but I haven't compared it to equivalent functions in the 
raster package).

Thanks to Johan van der Wouw for testing the RSAGA on unix.

Cheers
   Alex

-- 
Alexander Brenning
brenning at uwaterloo.ca - T +1-519-888-4567 ext 35783
Department of Geography and Environmental Management
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. W - Waterloo, ON - Canada N2L 3G1
http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/geography/faculty/brenning/