Observations in Science by Kyle Chezik
Shiny offers methods for taking typically static plots and making them interactive. Here is a simple plot of water discharge in the Fraser River basin plotted annually between 1970 and 2007. I made the plot by smoothing over a window of years. This helps show how smaller watersheds are more variable from year to year than larger catchments. It also demonstrates how larger catchments are the aggregate of smaller catchments. As smaller systems bounce around in sometimes opposite directions, the larger catchments stay relatively stable as they are an average of the smaller watersheds. Thus we have this woven looking system with the main stem at its core. By moving the slider we can see how when considering long term trends the overall variability is much lower than when considering shorter time periods suggesting rivers may dampen long-term drivers of change in flow by integrating varied responses throughout the watershed. I argue this much further in my paper River Networks Dampen Long-Term Hydrological Signals of Climate Change , published in Geophysical Research Letters.