Plotting time intervals in R and tiling for several years

Question

I am currently trying to plot the effort in sampling for my masters thesis, which looks something similar to this:

Figure 1:

So i have data for 3 years, and i want to reflect the exact days of the month when each deployment started and finished. But in R, i only manage to plot the following:

Figure 2:

The thing is, i would like my plot to show only the 12 months in the x axis and overlap the years on the y axis, so that the figure is "slimmer". I am guessing i have to somehow take out the year of the POSIXct dates, but i do not manage to represent the intervals as precisely then.

I did a subset of my data for this question and my script looks like this:

library(ggplot2)      
library(scales)
library(tidyverse)
library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

Deployment3 <- seq(from = as.Date("2021-12-15"), to = as.Date("2021-12-31"), by = "day"); 
deploy3 <- data.frame(count=1:length(Deployment3)); 
deploy3$day <- Deployment3; 
deploy3$year <- format(Deployment3, "%Y");  
deploy3$id <- "Deployment 3"
deploy3$start <- as.Date("2021-12-15"); deploy3$end <- as.Date("2021-12-31"); 

Deployment7 <- seq(from = as.Date("2022-12-17"), to = as.Date("2022-12-31"), by = "day"); 
deploy7 <- data.frame(count=1:length(Deployment7)); deploy7$day <- Deployment7; 
deploy7$year <- format(Deployment7, "%Y");  deploy7$id <- "Deployment 7";
deploy7$start <- as.Date("2022-12-17"); deploy7$end <- as.Date("2022-12-31");

Deployment7b <- seq(from = as.Date("2023-01-01"), to = as.Date("2023-01-31"), by = "day"); 
deploy7b <- data.frame(count=1:length(Deployment7b)); deploy7b$day <- Deployment7b; 
deploy7b$year <- format(Deployment7b, "%Y");  deploy7b$id <- "Deployment 7"
deploy7b$start <- as.Date("2023-01-01"); deploy7b$end <- as.Date("2023-01-31")

deployments <- bind_rows(deploy3,deploy7,deploy7b)
deployments$start <- as.Date(deployments$start)
deployments$end <- as.Date(deployments$end)

ggplot(deployments) + 
geom_tile(aes(x = start, y = as.factor(year), width = end - start), height = 0.4) +
scale_x_date(date_labels = "%b", date_breaks = "1 month", expand = c(0, 0)) +  
labs(x = "Month", y = "Year") +
theme_minimal() +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1))

If somebody would have any idea or suggestion to make the fig.2 more similar to fig.1 would be great.

Thank you and cheers!

Answer 1

I've used line segments that I group by year and in this case, deployment, so they can span multiple years, my x axis is the day of the year, with months as labels:

library(ggplot2)      
library(scales)
library(tidyverse)
library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

df <- tribble(
  ~start, ~end,
  "2021-09-25", "2021-11-08",  
  "2021-11-16", "2021-11-30",
  "2021-12-08", "2022-01-02",
  "2022-04-15", "2022-06-07",
  "2022-08-15", "2022-11-30",
  "2022-12-15", "2023-01-20",
  "2023-02-15", "2023-04-07",
  "2023-07-07", "2023-08-14",
  "2023-08-15", "2023-09-30",
  "2023-10-10", "2023-11-30"
  )  |> 
  mutate(deployment = paste0("D", row_number())) |>
  mutate(across(start:end, ymd)) |>  
  reframe(day = seq.Date(start, end, "day"), .by = c(deployment, start, end)) |>  
  mutate(year = year(day),
         yday = yday(day),
         group = paste(year, deployment, sep = "_")
         )

tail(df)

ggplot(data = df) +
  coord_cartesian(clip = 'off') +
  geom_line(aes(
    x = yday, 
    y = year, 
    group = group, 
    color = deployment
  ),
  alpha = .5,
  linewidth = 12)+
  scale_y_reverse(
    breaks = sort(unique(df$year)), 
    limits = rev(range(unique(df$year)) + c(-.8, .8))
  )+
  scale_x_continuous(
    breaks = yday(seq(from = as.Date("2021-01-15"), to = as.Date("2021-12-15"), by = "month")),
    labels = month.abb,
    position = "top"
  )+
  labs(x = "", y = "")+
  theme_void()+
  theme(aspect.ratio = 1/4,
        legend.position = "none",
        axis.text = element_text(size = 12),
        panel.grid.minor.y = element_line(color = "grey95", linewidth = .5),
  )