User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
When participating in the virtual forest tutorial activity, I used three sampling strategies, haphazard area sampling, stratified-random sampling and systematic sampling.
When looking at the haphazard area sampling method results, I found the sampling time to be the fastest at 18 hours 59 minutes. Following this was systematic sampling at 26hours 58 minutes and finally random at 63 hours 18 minutes. With haphazard, I found reducing bias selection was difficult when considering the topography and cluster images. I was drawn to selecting those areas first in hopes of greater concentration of results. Unfortunately this was not the case and haphazard proved to be the least accurate method of sampling for common and uncommon species. The most accurate method was also the most time consuming. When filling in the random sampling selections, I found the greatest variation in discovered species as well as the highest accuracy in percentages.
The two most common species were:
Red maple
Haphazard-9.0%
Random-1.0%
Stratified-3.25%
Chestnut oak
Haphazard-34.0%
Random-3.25%
Stratified-3.75%
The two rarest species were:
Sweet birch
Haphazard-90.0%
Random-0.1%
Stratified-82.0%
White ash
Haphazard-90.0%
Random-0%
Stratified-100%
When reviewing the effects of density on the accuracy of species sampling I found higher density species had a greater accuracy in recordings. The lower density species, when found have a very high accuracy, but often are not found which greatly reduced the accuracy.
