Many soil micro studies don't characterize their own soil texture but rather state the texture described as part of the USDA soil series (ex: sandy clay loam). However, a goal of my current incubation experiment is to determine how edaphic properties influence microbially-facilitated C cycling. Because of this, I needed to know the exact composition of the soil texture so I could account for the percent sand, silt, and clay in my analysis.
Fast forward to the other night as I was busy preparing data and making figures for the DOE PI meeting coming up in April. I prepared a table of soil properties (% sand, % silt, % clay, %C, %, N, DOC, MBC...) and began to think about how the nuances of soil texture seem to be lost in such a table. I mused about making a ternary figure to represent texture and tweeted to see if other soil folks like the idea.
The response was positive so that evening I ignored the pile of dishes in my sink and played around with ggtern to see how it looked and posted a mockup of the figure.
People seemed to really like the way the figure turned out and I had several requests for the code. I've worked a bit more on the formatting so that the figure better matched other figures from this project. I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out and think this is a nice way to show the variety of soils I used in my experiments. Below are the final figure and code used to to create it.
The response was positive so that evening I ignored the pile of dishes in my sink and played around with ggtern to see how it looked and posted a mockup of the figure.
People seemed to really like the way the figure turned out and I had several requests for the code. I've worked a bit more on the formatting so that the figure better matched other figures from this project. I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out and think this is a nice way to show the variety of soils I used in my experiments. Below are the final figure and code used to to create it.