Blog Post 4: Sampling Strategies

After using the sampling techniques I have found that the fastest sampling technique was the systematic sampling technique with it taking 12 hours and 39 minutes. The percent error is shown in Table 1. Both haphazard and random sampling lacked finding the striped maple, while the systematic approach still had a very large percent error. It appeared that the random sampling overall had a lower percent error than the other two techniques; however, with 24 samples, the percent error for all plants is still statistically significant. This is interesting as I wouldn’t have expected the percent errors to be so high with this many samples. The two more abundant species have a lower percent error than the two less abundant species. Therefore, abundance did appear to influence the percent error.

Table 1. Haphazard, Random and Systematic sampling percent error in regards to density. The (*) indicates no species found in the trials for said technique.