MiRA › Tutorials › Temporal

How do I visualize a temporal network in MiRA?

In a temporal multilayer network, each layer is a snapshot in time — a season, month, or year. Interlayer links connect the same node across consecutive layers, so you can see which interactions persist, appear, or disappear over time. MiRA visualizes this in the browser with no installation and no code.

The dataset

The Portuguese temporal seed dispersal network (Costa et al. 2020) has 5 layers, 29 nodes, and 170 within-layer plus 43 between-layer links. Each layer is a time period; nodes are plants and their seed-dispersing animals; interlayer links couple the same species across time. It is bipartite and temporal — small enough to read every link clearly.

Walkthrough

1. Open MiRA, click Load Example Data, and choose Portuguese temporal seed dispersal network.
2. In Network Mode, the layers stack in time order. Rotate the view so the time axis runs left to right, and follow the interlayer links to see continuity between periods.
3. Switch to Grid View to place each time period in its own panel. This is the clearest way to see turnover — which interactions are present early, which appear late, and which persist throughout.
4. Use Search to highlight one species across every time period at once, tracing its interaction history through the sequence.
5. Use the Interlayer Links controls to emphasise temporal coupling, and the intralayer threshold to focus on the strongest interactions in each period.
6. Open Dashboard Mode to compare periods quantitatively with degree distributions and the layer-similarity heatmap — adjacent time periods that are similar indicate stability; dissimilar ones indicate rapid change.

Use your own data

Represent each time point as a layer and couple repeated nodes with interlayer links, then export to MiRA's JSON or CSV format and use Load Data. The emln R package builds temporal multilayer structures directly.