User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
The sampling strategy in the virtual forest tutorial that had the fasted estimated sampling time was haphazard sampling. For one of the two rarest species, White Pine, haphazard sampling had the most accurate results with a 1.2% error. The other rarest species, Striped Maple, has no accurate sampling strategy with this tutorial (all sampling strategies had >100% error).
For the most common species, Eastern Hemlock, systematic sampling narrowly beat out random sampling with 20% error (compared to 20.6% random sampling). For the second most common species, the Red Maple, systematic sampling had a much wider margin on accuracy with a 32.7% error (as opposed to 53% for both other strategies).
Species abundance did not seem to have a massive effect on accuracy; the lowest percent error was for a rare species. This leads me to believe more replicate samples should be done in a study like this for a better representative sampling.
Overall, it seems that a systematic sampling strategy had the lowest percent error for more species than the other two sampling strategies. Haphazard sampling yielded the lowest percent error for a few species and random samples did not produce the lowest percent error for any of the species in the tutorial.
