The EcologicalNetworksPlots package extends EcologicalNetworks to provide plotting functionalities, by allowing network objects to be used with Plots, which must also be installed and loaded. This documentation has a complete reference of the functions and types, as well as a gallery of examples.

Plotting a network can be done in two ways. First, as a heatmap, in which case no arguments are necessary. Second, as the usual nodes and links visualization.

The second option requires to set a layout, of which there are multiple types according to the type of network, the type of layout, and the information to emphasize. Applying a layout consists of a call to initial, followed by one or more calls to position!. The nodes in the network are represented using scatter, and the links using plot. Probabilistic networks have link probability denoted as transparency, and quantitative network have link strength represented as width.

Both the fill and color of the nodes can be changed, using the nodefill and nodesize arguments – these must be dictionaries mapping all nodes in the network to a single numerical value, and they affect the markerfill and markerz value of Plots, respectively. Note that by default, frametype is :none and legend is false, but this can be changed. It is particularly important to change it for UnravelledLayout, for example.

An important point, which can be used to create complex visualisations, is that you can call the scatter and plot functions on dictionaries of positions that have more points that are in the network. This can, among other things, allow you to use different colormaps for the degree of different nodes, or color different sub-graphs in the network. There are a few example of these uses in the documentation.