This week a spent a lot of time getting to know R Studio better in terms of making graphs to help represent what the data shows. For this, I used the data set titled “Benthic Image Analysis.” This data set discusses the species located at the absolute bottom of the Hawaiian Coral Reefs. The species included in this data were coral, soft coral, coralline alga, macroalga, mobile fauna, sediment, sessile invertebrate, tape, wand, shadow, turf alga, and a few other species that are unclassified.
Since there were ten categories of species, and data had been collected on them from 2010 and 2013, I wanted to see what the differences in population of the species looked like. So first I looked at each different species and found out what subcategories they were comprised of. For example, in 2010, the Sessile Invertebrates had been made up of 8% sponge, 6% Bryozoan, 66% Zoanthid, and 20% unclassified invertebrates. I had done this for the data collected in 2013 as well and with the other species documented and created pie charts for each of them.
After doing this and getting the total number for each category in 2010 and 2013, I created a grouped bar chart to compare side by side to see how the populations of the species increased and decreased between those years. I ended up having to create my own data set within R Studio from the total populations because this wasn’t a set of numbers listed itself in the original data set. Making a bar chart was honestly extremely difficult, it took me a whole two days to figure out because I think there was something wrong with the data set I made itself or the way I was writing it into the code.
Regardless, I understand how to make grouped bar charts (and regular bar charts) now and may use them again in the future. Since I have 13 more data sets to look through I plan on getting through at least two a week, at most three, in order to have everything ready to analyze by the end of the semester.