Behind the Joy Division river flow figure

A sneak peek into how I made the figure from this week's post using R

When people think of ecologists, the default image is often someone cuddling a furry animal or spotting birds through binoculars. The reality is most of us are glorified statisticians. We spend most of our time analysing data and that requires getting proficient at programming.

Obviously, I love my rare excursions into the field, but the one part of my job that I can easily lose a whole day to is working on a challenging data wrangling or analysis problem. Unfortunately though, as my career has progressed, I’ve spent less and less time doing this.

Quite a few folks were interested in the figure I produced for Monday’s post on river extremes. So I thought I’d give you a peek behind the curtain of the Joy Division–style hydrograph (river flow time series) from the Yampa River, Colorado.

I’ve always loved how hydrographs reveal a river’s personality, and this aesthetic turns that seasonal rhythm into something almost musical, like the cover from Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album. Each line is one year of flow data, stacked to create those “ridges” (hence the name ridgeline plot).