User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
The sampling strategies put a lot into perspective for me. The first strategy of symptomatic sampling was the fastest and seemed to be more accurate than the other sampling strategies, while randomly sampling and subjective sampling took longer and seemed less accurate. Overall, my data suggested it would take 12 hours to gather all this data, which was surprising in general.
Moving onto percentage errors for the two most common species and rarest species was also interesting. Eastern Hemlock and Sweet Birch, the most common species, both had low percentage errors varying from 6% to 15%. When comparing to the Striped Maple and White Pine, both species had percentage errors exceeding 100%. The most accurate sampling strategy for the rare trees and common trees seemed to be random sampling. But overall, for all sampling strategies, the systematic sampling yielded the most accurate results.
I observed that with less species, there was a larger margin for error in sampling, than for the common species. In general, I found I was curious why there are less of Striped Maple and White Pine than the other species of trees.
Overall, a very interesting tutorial!
