Stacked Area Visualization

This link is pretty well known amongst people doing online visualizations. Its far and away one of the best examples of putting a lot of data in front of users in a way that is easy to understand. Here's a picture of the "baby name explorer" in use:

There is a lot of data here, over 2500 numbers. Yet its easy to tell exactly what's going on.

Imagine doing this for all taxa at a particular site! Right now we can only really show a 3-4 taxa on a line graph at any given site. This kind of visualization could show you every taxa, and not only their relative abundance but also the total number of individuals counted at a site over time.

At SCI-Hazards, if we showed only fish, the visualization would represent 186 datapoints.

Showing all taxa that had mean number per meter squared counts would mean 432 datapoints.

While all the data at once may be a little overwhelming in some cases, users could limit the display to specific trophic and functional groupings, or any of those user-defined categories we discussed at the last meeting. Once someone found a trend that looked interesting, they could use the other plotting tools to get error bars and something they could print.

I saw this last year and it looked impossible to implement at that time. The baby name explorer is written as a java applet, a technology that has become very rare to see in the wild anymore. However, I'm building the new site with Flex/Flash integration in mind. Flex is a tool made specifically for creating rich interactions like this and it is gaining a lot of momentum. I thought of this technology as more of a further down the line tool but maybe this would be a good use of Flex now. I bought an Adobe Flex book last night, and it should help me evaluate how difficult something like this might be.