Develop tools to summarize ForestGEO data

[maurolepore]

This issue starts to collect ideas for summaries of ForestGEO data which could be included in different tools, for example:

• A bookdown book.
• A shiny app.
• A function that creates a report in different formats.

Feel free to add more ideas as comments below.

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Background

Today I discussed with Patrick Jansen the idea of developing tools to summarize ForestGEO data that could be used to gain some insight about plot data short after it's been collected.

This idea related to building the new generation of ForestGEO plot-books (online, interactive, built with pkgdown), which @teixeirak is working on. She started a repository to work on such a book, and that seems to be the best place to discuss this issue. But I discuss it here because that repository is now private.

Some specific ideas

Patrick would like to visualize data from a site relative to other sites. These are some specific visualizations he proposes:

• Cumulative area versus cumulative number of species. This gives a curve for each plot.
• Same but cumulative number of stems versus cumulative number of species.
• Scatterplot of total number of stems versus total number of species. This gives a point per plot.

Interactivity: Data from the focal plot could be highlighted by clicking on the legend of a plotly graph.

[teixeirak]

I don't see any particular need to keep that repo private, but I want to see what @gonzlezeb and @alyssaterrell think.

[alyssaterrell]

I also don't think that the repository needs to remain private, considering there is no specific information that has been provided.

Secondly, I think Patrick's ideas are fantastic and are along the lines of what I was thinking.

[maurolepore]

@alyssaterrell I'm happy to review your code and help you attract other great researchers like Patrick to maximize the number of good ideas from which to pick.

[teixeirak]

@alyssaterrell, keep in mind that this repo will host the whole process of book development, so it would mean anyone being able to see the book as its developing. I'm comfortable with that whole process being public.