My guess is that critical senses are dulled because of respect for Nightingale's other achievements (and her status as an icon of various kinds) and because it's, in journalistic or historical senses, part of a cracking good story.Ī very small detail, but again one that often arises, is that Nightingale didn't intend to call the _design_ a coxcomb that was an offhand comment she made about the graph.Ī central point is to me that the circular format is at best justifiable if the pattern shown is strongly seasonal. The Economist, not usually known for sentimental slush, went all gooey about it in its Christmas issue for 2007. It's curious that this graph repeatedly gets largely uncritical reports like that quoted here - as if the story were new and as if the graph were not intensely problematic. Other visualizations of these data could include a pie graph or histogram, but the polar area diagram can make each data point “pop”.As you say, this would be much better as a line graph. The polar area diagrams using the FIA data are revealing because they show cyclical data through the calendar year and they visualize the number of plot measurements in each month. Some forest inventories occur in the winter months but in small numbers. In the Northeast, Rocky Mountain and West Coast states, the forest inventories begin in earnest in April and then mostly conclude by October. In the Southeast and North Central regions of the US, the number of forest inventories occur at generally the same rate across the year.īut in regions where snow and cold temperatures present a barrier to getting field work done in the winter, few forest inventories occur. The monthly trends in forest inventory data collection is not constant across different regions in the US. Not surprisingly, the majority of FIA plots are measured in the summer months when field work is most active. The total number of FIA plot measurements was smallest in December (12,786 measurements) and largest in June (22,836 measurements). The result was about what you might expect for a country that has mostly temperate forests and where field work is limited to many regions in the winter months. Here is a table of the results: Table 1: Number of FIA plot measurements in each month. I also filtered the data so that at least one accessible forest land condition was present on an FIA plot. This included all FIA plots that were inventoried since about the late 1990s or early 2000s for most US states. I filtered the data to obtain the measurements of all FIA plots that were collected as a part of the annual inventory design. The specific variable I was interested in was MEASMON, a variable contained in the PLOT table that lists the month in which the forest was inventoried. I queried the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database to obtain the months that forests were inventoried. I wanted to use polar area diagrams to answer one question: In which months do forest inventories occur across the United States? Polar area diagrams in forest inventories In celebration of Nightingale, who was born 200 years ago this year, it’s worth thinking about how polar area diagrams might be fitting to visualize forestry data. This is how Nightengale described deaths from preventable diseases, wounds, and other causes. Multiple layers can be added within a diagram.They are easy to read around the “rose” because data are presented chronologically. For example, the counts of a phenomenon in each of the 12 calendar months of a year.
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