Creating figures like the paper ‘Completeness of Digital Accessible Knowledge of Plants of Ghana’ Part 2

Continuing from Part 1, in case you have not done so, please set up the data as described before we try to make this temporal polar plot.

To create Figure 1b. Graph showing accumulation of records through time (during the year) we need  use function tempolar. This name ‘tempolar’ is simply a short of ‘temporal polar’. For this plot, we just count records for each Julian day, without considering the year. This tells us about seasonality of the data records.

Let us continue from the the previous part with code too, if if you do not have the data set up, please visit Part 1 and run the code.

First create just a very basic tempolar plot.

tempolar(occ)

Now this created the following graph:

This graph looks very different than what we want to create. This is plotting the data for each day, but the plot we want is for monthly data. Let us sue timescale = “m” to specify monthly data aggregation.

tempolar(occ,timescale = 'm')

Now this created the following graph:

So now this is what we expected to have as a figure. One final thing is to add a better title.

tempolar(occ,timescale = 'm', color = "blue",
         title = 'Pattern of accumulation of records 
                  of Indian Birds by month')

Currently the tempolar does not have ability to display values for each month. Is that very important and needs to be added? We would like to hear form the users.

If you have suggestions on improving the features of package bdvis please leave comments Github repository.

References

• Asase, Alex, and A Townsend Peterson. 2016. “Completeness of Digital Accessible Knowledge of Plants of Ghana.” Biodiversity Informatics, 1–11. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17161/bi.v11i0.5860.
• Barve, Vijay, and Javier Otegui. 2016. “Bdvis: Visualizing Biodiversity Data in R.” Bioinformatics. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btw333.