We Stitch Together a Figure

This week in the lab, I continued putting some finishing touches on my oyster mortality project. I have a few items left to wrap up, but I am excited that I'm nearly done with this major project. I do recognize, however, that finishing these steps will not mark the completion of the project. I will need to present this work, get feedback from my presentation, incorporate that feedback into my writing, and then send the work off for independent peer review.

What do I mean when I say that I stitched together a figure? Well, the coding program that I use for my work has wonderful plotting functions but sometimes I don't know the best way to create a narrative plot using the program. For instance, if I need to make a plot of a map, I will likely use ArcGIS or Matlab, two programs that are not my coding program, but excel with geographic information and plots. If I want to plot data points and modify the shapes or colors, the coding program I use is well suited for the task. If I want to combine maps and data points, then I will likely create separate assets and merge them in an illustration program, which is what I worked through this week.

One of the aspects of my project is comparing oyster mortality in the Mississippi Sound during freshwater discharge events to oyster mortality reported in the scientific literature across North America. Much of this literature is from studies in the Chesapeake Bay, but there are also studies as far north as Maine and as far south as the Yucatan peninsula. My goal with the figure is to show both the mortality rates and the location of each study, in case there are interesting geographic trends, so I made my data plot in my coding program, created independent maps in ArcGIS, and then stitched the components together outside of these two programs. One of the benefits of completing this process across multiple programs is that I feel I have more control over the look of the end product and I can quickly add the components to PowerPoint and evaluate how the finished presentation looks.