Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: ordination
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: ordination
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: Condit et al. 2002, via vegan (Oksanen et al. 2026) (GPL)

chart

ordination

Projection of objects described by many variables into a low-dimensional space.

Classification

  • chart
  • points and bubbles › scatterplots
  • correlation

Channels

Variants

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 578 papers since 1977, 18% in the last five years; mostly in Environmental Science, Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Earth and Planetary Sciences; Wikidata

Seminal references

R packages

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(vegan)

## Principal coordinates of the Bray-Curtis dissimilarities between plots.
data(BCI, BCI.env)
pcoa <- cmdscale(vegdist(BCI, method = "bray"), k = 2, eig = TRUE)
share <- scales::percent(pcoa$eig[1:2] / sum(pcoa$eig[pcoa$eig > 0]), accuracy = 1)
habitats <- c(OldHigh = "Old, high plateau", OldLow = "Old, low plateau", OldSlope = "Old, slope",
              Swamp = "Swamp", Young = "Young forest")
plots <- data.frame(pcoa$points, habitat = habitats[as.character(BCI.env$Habitat)])

p <- ggplot(plots, aes(x = X1, y = X2, colour = habitat)) +
  geom_hline(yintercept = 0, colour = "#d6d6d6", linewidth = 0.3) +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 0, colour = "#d6d6d6", linewidth = 0.3) +
  geom_point(size = 2) +
  coord_fixed() +
  labs(title = "Slope and high-plateau plots separate along axis 1",
       subtitle = "PCoA of tree counts in 50 plots, Barro Colorado Island",
       x = paste0("Axis 1 (", share[1], ")"), y = paste0("Axis 2 (", share[2], ")"),
       colour = "Habitat",
       caption = "Data: Condit et al. 2002, via the vegan R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "") +
  theme(axis.text = element_blank(), legend.position = "right", legend.direction = "vertical")

Sources (5)

366 occurrences in the corpus

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/ordination.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. ordination. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/ordination.html

BibTeX
@incollection{taudiere2026-ordination,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {ordination},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/ordination.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-02. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.