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Blog Post 4: Sampling Strategies
- Three sampling techniques that were used in the Virtual forest tutorial are Systematic, Random and Haphazard with 30 samples taken from each.
- The results show that systematic has the fastest estimated sampling time by over an hour and haphazard had the slowest sampling time.
- From the data below, the accuracy did in fact change with species abundance. Overall, the systematic sampling strategy was the fastest and the most accurate. The comparison % errors are low across the different samples with the samples spreading out over a large area to allow for more accurate comparisons.
Systematic: 5 hrs, 5 min
Random: 6 hrs, 21 min
Haphazard: 13 hrs, 35 min
Comparison of % error between 2 common & 2 rare tree species:
Eastern Hemlock (Common), Sweet Birch (Common), Striped Maple (Rare), White Pine (Rare);
Systematic: 2.2%, 13%, 27%, 12%
Random: 19%, 7%, 11%, 12%
Haphazard: 15.9%, 4.8%, 51.9%, 49.7%
