User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
During my initial field data collection efforts at Terwillegar Park, I had no major difficulties implementing the stratified sampling strategy. However, the one difficulty I started to encounter was an increase presence of people and dogs in the park by the time I was finishing up the last point count locations. Due the increased presence of people and dogs present I was encountering disturbance during my 10 minutes of counting birds. Due too this disturbance I have opted to decrease the amount of time spent at each point count location to 5 minutes. I don’t anticipate that decreasing the time spent at each site will have a large effect on the study as I was noticing that I was counting most birds present within the first 5 minutes. Decreasing the time spent will allow me to ensure that each point count location is surveyed with no additional disturbance at the sites later in the morning.
