User talk:BeccaMGM/sandbox

Iron Cycle Figure Peer Review

The figure for the iron cycle is so much improved, I really loved the new one and I thought Becca did a really nice job with it. While incorporating multiple sources and arrows, on both land, ocean, and crust, it is still clear and easy to follow. The graphics are clean and colorful, nice to look at (I love the little ship and the hydrothermal vents!) and overall, it is a greatly improved figure for the iron cycle wikipedia page. I think the figure did a really nice job both minimizing white space but making the labels very clear and easy to read. It was easy to follow where the arrows are going, what they are connected to, and what the arrows are showing. The font was clear and large enough, and the images accompanying are clear and well-drawn. It is scientifically accurate, at least to my knowledge. One suggestion would be to define the terms “dissolved” and “particulate”. I’m assuming it means dissolved or particulate iron? Others, like plankton or glaciers, aren’t followed by a term, so for those two I think a clearer definition could be helpful.

My largest suggestion for the figure would be to include some quantitative values. I would consider either adding some numbers in parentheses, or even doing comparison-style wider arrows for the larger fluxes and thinner arrows for smaller fluxes. If you can’t find all the actual values, differentiating arrow sizes could be a way to at least show which fluxes are the larger or more influential in the cycle. You don’t want it to get too complicated, so this option could also be instead included in more detail in the figure caption, but quantitative values should be included in some way. A paper that I found helpful with some numbers, at least for the ocean portions, is the Jickell paper in Science (http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1105959).

I also found the figure caption to be very well-written. One suggestion I would have here is that the caption begins by describing “iron circulates through the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere”, but those regions aren’t defined or delineated in the figure. Could there be a way to incorporate that—or wikilink those definitions—in order to make that clearer? Other than that, I found the caption to be very detailed. I appreciated how it did a great job of connecting all the different portions I discussed in my article portion of the iron cycle—it really did a nice job showing how it is all interconnected and the feedbacks from each of these fluxes.

The sources included seemed good to me. Overlapped with the Wikipedia article some, but not too much, which is both complementary but expanding in a good way. I would suggest checking out the Jickell paper linked above, and perhaps some of the sources cited within that paper for improved quantitative values, but otherwise it felt well cited with relevant, trustworthy citations. Annikaj3 (talk) 12:06, 27 March 2019 (UTC)