library(lattice) # month is defined as a factor with 12 levels, of which only levels 4 to 12 # are present in the data. # Note that month.abb is a predefined constant in R. # Here it provides the labels for all 12 levels. df <- expand.grid(site=c("CrCr","NFSC","MFSC","SFSC","LMO","MCE","MUE","MLE"), month=factor(4:12,levels=1:12, labels=month.abb, ordered=TRUE)) df$conc <- rnorm(dim(df)[1]) # introduce some missing values i <- sample(1:dim(df)[1],6) df$conc[i] <- NA # so there some missing points in the plot dotplot(month~conc|site,data=df)