Hi, I'm going to try to do some species distribution modeling in R using Mahalanobis distance. I have presence point locations for the species and I have ASCII files for each of the WorldClim variables for North America. My question is how do I bring these into R? If this is too complex, I have done an extract multi values to points function in ArcInfo and have the values for each climate variable for each point location (many columns/fields of data). Would it be better to work with just the single shapefile that contains point lat/long as well as all the climate values? I'm just learning R so apologies if this is a stupid question. Thanks, Lori