User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Hello!
For the Virtual Forest tutorial, I used “Area” rather than “distance” and performed systematic, random, and haphazard sampling. The sampling technique with the fastest estimate sampling time was systematic at 12 hours, 5 minutes. following not too far behind was random sampling at 12 hours and 46 minutes and haphazard at 12 hours and 30 minutes. The percent error for the density of the 2 most common and the rarest species are as follows:
most common: Eastern Hemlock. Haphazard: 31.24% Systematic: 25.03% Random: 16.15%
Sweet Birch: Haphazard: 17.02% systematic: 53.87% random: 32.60%
rarest: White Pine. Haphazard: 1.20% systematic: 48.81% random: 50.00%
Striped Pine. Haphazard: 42.86% Systematic: 4.57% random: 76.00%
The accuracy did not seem to change with species abundance as there is no consistent trend between the standard errors for the common species and the rare species. as well, one sampling strategy does not appear to be more accurate than the others.
