Reading on one of my favorite blogs actually made me take a harder stance on the Sankey diagram I presented in my last post. Following Kaiser’s attitude of making it better rather than only criticizing, I redesigned the Sankey diagram of phosphorus flows in the Peel-Harvey catchment area.
In the first version I didn’t differentiate the various sources of phosphorus, but only used one color for the overall flow quantity. Introducing nodes dramatically improves the comprehensibility and the mass balance check for the flows branching off sideways. There is some redundancy in the labeling of the flows, but I left it to stick as close to the original Sankey diagram as possible.
The second Sankey diagram is even closer to the original one. I tried to match the colors as much, and also introduced a legend. Please note that, since I didn’t have access to the raw data, I just approximated the flow values. Because of the multi flow arrows, I decided to leave a border line at each arrow, and to put heads to the first two input flows (‘fertiliser P input’ and ‘non fertiliser P input’) to better be able to distinguish them.
