New Methodology: The Future of the Eucalyptus Team

As we have said in our previous posts, transect sampling turned out to be more difficult to implement than we initially thought. Practically speaking, it required us to walk up and down steep transects and we struggled to keep our lines even as we trudged through poison oak. This sampling method also turned out to be very time consuming. So, we have moved on to plan B: point count sampling.

My footprints looking back down the Bloody Nose Trail

When we go out in the field tomorrow we will be randomly sampling from a selection of many points scattered throughout the study area. We hope that this will give the opportunity to sample a representative grouping of the entire population. Similar to our first field day, we will locate the points using GPS while out in the field. At each point, an imaginary circle with a 15 meter radius will be drawn and every individual eucalyptus tree inside will be counted. If our initial methods testing has any predictive power, than we expect most of our points to contain somewhere around 40 individuals. We hope to sample from at least 10 different points tomorrow. The more we are able to sample from, the more confident we can be in our estimation. Unfortunately, our time constraints may force us to do fewer.

After collecting our data, we will be able to calculate an estimation for the total eucalyptus population within the study area. This is possible because we know the total area of the study site as well as the area of our sampling points. Using the average eucalyptus count from the sampling points,we can calculate the eucalyptus density. From the density we can derive the total population by multiplying the average by the number of times the point area goes into the total area.

But, before we get ahead of ourselves, some field work must be done! Join us next time where we will explore our second sampling excursion and discuss the results of our study.

   -Nathan