4 – Sampling Strategies

For this experiment, I selected the Mohn Hill community. It had an abundance of unique species that I sampled across the 84 sampling opportunities. Red maple, white oak, and chestnut oaks were found at the highest density regardless of the sampling technique used. Many of the rare species were missed in the samples, while other rare species were measured inaccurately. Definitely, more accuracy of measurements were achieved in more common species as compared to those that are more rarely located.

The most efficient sampling method was definitely haphazard sampling (t = 4hr 24min) – taking an hour less than both the random and systematic sampling strategies (t = 5hr 6min and t = 5hr 4min, respectively). For most common tree species with frequencies >10% the densities were best estimated by random sampling (table 1). Rare species were difficult to measure with accuracy using any of the three sampling methods. 24 samples were not enough to accurately capture the number of species in this habitat.

Table 1. Percent error between the density of common and rare species (the two most common species were red maple and white oak, while my two rarest species were sweet birch and American basswood) for each of the three sampling methods used (systematic, random and haphazard).