Integrating spatio-temporal information in environmental monitoring data-a visualization approach applied to moss data

Large-scale environmental monitoring data being sparse and collected on irregular grids, which may differ from year to year, are difficult to analyse and present. The traditional techniques from statistics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) may not be useful given the often relatively small sample size combined with varying sampling density. In this study, the freeware visualization package XmdvTool was used for integration and exploration of monitoring data from three surveys of terrestrial mosses. Data on contents of Cu, Ni, Pb, V and Zn in mosses within an area of 300×300 km in southern Sweden, sampled in 1985 (177 samples), 1990 (156 samples) and 1995 (188 samples), were integrated and visualized using parallel coordinate and scatterplot display techniques. Several interesting findings about multi-element composition of samples, as well as changing temporal trends in the relations of five metals were made during interactive visual discovery. Visualization techniques for high-dimensional data may have limitations considering, for example, number of variables, ranges of data values, and spatial scales. Nevertheless, interactive data manipulation tools encourage the process of visual exploration, and the unique way of integrating spatial, temporal and multi-element components of moss data provided visual insights that are not possible to gain with traditional analysis tools.