Post 4: Sampling Strategies

Using the area-based sampling, these are my results from the visual forest tutorial:

Based on my results, all three sampling techniques took about the same time, but the random sampling was slightly faster at 12 hours and 15 minutes.The two most common species were the Eastern Hemlock and the Sweet Birch. Systematic sampling yielded the lowest percentage error for these species. The two least common species were the Striped Maple and the White Pine. As you can see, the percentage errors were extremely high for the Striped Maple using the systematic and haphazard sampling techniques and very low using random sampling. For the White Pine, all the sampling techniques yielded high percentage errors but haphazard sampling was the lowest at 50%. The accuracy seemed to be greater with the more abundant species as the percentage errors were lower compared to the less abundant species. Based off my results, I cannot say that one sampling strategy was more accurate than the others, as the results were varying. I would need a larger sample size in order to obtain more accurate results.