Blog Post 4 – Sampling Strategies

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For the virtual forest tutorial, I used the area-based model for my systematic, randomized and haphazard sampling of vegetation. The technique which required the least amount of time was the haphazard method. However, all sampling techniques had very similar sampling times around 12.5 hours. For the two most common species the systematic approach gave the best percent error results, while the haphazard sampling gave the worst results. Alternatively, the percent error for the two rarest species was best using the haphazard sampling technique. It seems that the systematic approach is more useful for large amounts of common species, while the haphazard sampling was more accurate for the rarer species. Based on the percent error data for all six species the haphazard method presented the best results on average, followed by the systematic and the randomized approach.

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