Author: Andrew L Jackson
Date: 2026-02-09

# Customising Plots Manually

#### Andrew L Jackson

#### 2026-02-09

## Creating a Blank Plot

In the vignette Introduction to Siber we used the bundled functions `plotSiberObject()` to create plots with ellipses and hulls and saw how we can use `plotGroupEllipses()` to add some customised ellipses. Here we will look in more detail at how we can add customised elements to a blank plot by calling the underlying functions directly. Again we will use the bundled example dataset.

    # remove previously loaded items from the current environment and remove previous graphics.
    rm(list=ls())
    graphics.off()

    # Here, I set the seed each time so that the results are comparable.
    # This is useful as it means that anyone that runs your code, *should*
    # get the same results as you, although random number generators change
    # from time to time.
    set.seed(1)

    library(SIBER)

    # Load the viridis package and create a new palette with 3 colours, one for
    # each of the 3 groups we have in this dataset.
    library(viridis)
    palette(viridis(3))

    # load in the included demonstration dataset
    data("demo.siber.data")

    #
    # create the siber object
    siber.example <- createSiberObject(demo.siber.data)

You don’t even have to use `plotSiberObject()` to plot your raw data. You could plot it all yourself directly from your raw data using any points, colours and axes styles that you want. In this example, I override the default points order using the option argument `points.order`. See the help file for the base graphics `points()` function which lists the mapping of the integers `1:25` to the corresponding point type. In this case I use the order `c(24, 22)` which corresponds to open triangles and open squares.

Next we want to add a single ellipse, fully customised to one of our clusters of data; i.e. one of the groups within a community. Here I define the group and community using two created variables so as you could adapt this run for any group/community combination you wanted, or perhaps more suitably, write a loop to traverse all your data.

    plotSiberObject(siber.example,
                      ax.pad = 2,
                      hulls = FALSE,
                      ellipses = FALSE,
                      group.hulls = FALSE,
                      bty = "L",
                      iso.order = c(1,2),
                      xlab = expression({delta}^13*C~'permille'),
                      ylab = expression({delta}^15*N~'permille'),
                      points.order = c(24,22)
                      )
    # Call addEllipse directly on each group to customise the plot fully

    # change c.id and g.id to select the group of data you want
    # you could embed this in a loop easily enough if you wanted to
    # set up the order of lines and simply loop through them.
    c.id <- 1 # specify the community ID
    g.id <- 1 # specify the group ID within the community

    # see help file for addEllipse for more information
    # NB i am using the group identifier g.id to select the colour
    # of the ellipse line so that it matches the one created by
    # plotSiberObject(), but you could override this if you wish.
    # The function addEllipse returns the coordinates it used for plotting,
    # but more than likely you dont need this information. Here I store these in
    # a new variable coords for clarity, but you could just as easily call this tmp.
    # See help file for addEllipse for more details on the options, but in short:
    # the first two entries look up the means and covariance matrix of the data you
    # specified using the group and commmunity indices above.
    # m = NULL is used as we are not plotting an ellipse around the mean.
    # n = 100 just determines how many points are used to draw a smooth ellipse.
    # p.interval = 0.95 for a 95% ellipse of the data
    # ci.mean = FALSE as we are not plotting an ellipse around the mean.
    # col = your choice of colour.
    # lty = your choice of line type.
    # lwd = your choice of line width.
    coords <- addEllipse(siber.example$ML.mu[[c.id]][ , , g.id],
                         siber.example$ML.cov[[c.id]][ , , g.id],
                         m = NULL,
                         n = 100,
                         p.interval = 0.95,
                         ci.mean = FALSE,
                         col = g.id,
                         lty = 3,
                         lwd = 2)

As this is just a simple base R graphics window, you can add lines, points and text as you like. You can also call the functions `plotGroupHulls(siber.example)` and `plotCommunityHulls(siber.example)` directly and customise their inputs as per the vignette Introduction to Siber.