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Blog Post 4: Sampling Strategies
Create a blog post describing the results of the three sampling strategies you used in the virtual forest tutorial. Which technique had the fastest estimated sampling time? Compare the percentage error of the different strategies for the two most common and two rarest species. Did the accuracy change with species abundance? Was one sampling strategy more accurate than another?
I looked at the Mohn forest for the exercise. I found that the time spend was approximately the same when using the haphazard and random methods for area, with the random taking slightly less time. The haphazard strategy resulted in more species found (richness) and more plants counted. In this particular situation though, I think the random method is better because the forest is a quite patchy, having had many disturbances. If it was the Snyder forest, which is quite homogenous, randomness wouldn’t be as important.
