User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
For my virtual forest sampling tutorial I used the area-based method. All my sampling times were similar in length and quite long:
Systematic: 12 hours 37 mins
Random: 12 hours 41 mins
Haphazard: 12 hours 26 mins
It is difficult for me to draw a conclusion on fastest time since they are all so similar. I assume the haphazard would’ve been faster if I had chosen a criteria rather than just randomly sampling without bias all over the whole map. This probably made it similar to the random technique time.
Here are the percent errors of the two most common and rarest species for each technique:
Systematic:
Common: 13.2% and 48.9%
Rare: 31.4% and 186.7%
Random:
Common: 3.5% and 45.3%
Rare:22.6% and 45.3%
Haphazard:
Common: 8.17% and 9.96%
Rare: 197.1% and 4.57%
When I calculated the mean error of each technique systematic had the highest mean error followed by haphazard, and the random technique had the lowest mean error.
As for accuracy related to species abundance, it does appear that the rare species had a higher rate of error.
