Shaded confidence intervals

Confidence intervals are usually displayed as dashed lines around the main line. This often creates a messy graph, particularly when plotting more than one trend. The use of shaded areas shown here is an elegant alternative. This allows combining different information in the same graph (e.g. comparing model predictions with empirical data), and may be specially interesting when small (e.g. inset) panels are required. Note that an extension of this technique would be to use different gray intensities to display different confidence intervals around the same main trend.




Figure legend. Black lines correspond to field data, while the white line and the shaded area represent the median and the 90% credible intervals obtained from samples of the posterior distribution of selected models. 

Figure from a previous version of the ms. Martínez, I., Wiegand, T., Camarero, J.J., Batllori, E. & Gutiérrez, E. (2011) Disentangling the formation of contrasting tree-line physiognomies combining model selection and Bayesian parameterization for simulation models. American Naturalist 177: E136-E152. (link)

Input courtesy of Dr. Isabel Martínez Cano