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The method I chose for the virtual forests tutorial was the area based method. The fastest sampling method was the systematic sampling method with a time of 12 hours 37 minutes, which was actually only within 20 minutes of the other methods. For the two most common species the systematic was the most accurate and was within a -7.2% and 5.5% sampling error, compared to 63.4% and 100.9% error for the haphazard, and 11.2% and-29% error for the random method. For the rare species the haphazard sampling method was the most accurate of the three methods, although it still had a 52.4% error for the white pine and -8.5% for the Striped Maple. The random sampling method gave an almost 200% error for the White Pine and a 100% error for the Striped Maple, and the systematic sampling method gave a 174% and -100% error for the Striped Maple and White Pine respectively.
In general the accuracy declined with both the systematic and random methods as the species got more rare, and slightly increased in accuracy for the haphazard method for rare species. The Shannon-Weiner diversity was calculated to be the identical for the true diversity and the systematic method which leads me to believe that it was the most accurate method, along with having lower percentage error for most species present. For the random and haphazard methods the diversity was found to be 1.4 which is 0.1 lower than the true diversity. I don’t believe there was enough points to capture the diversity of species because in both the systematic and the random methods, one species was not observed at all. Even though the Shannon-Weiner diversity was found to be accurate for the systematic sampling method, I would consider increasing the number of samples in order to guard against inaccuracy.
