Proposal to change the revisit design for prairie communities in the Heartland Network
James K, Morrison L, DeBacker M. 2009. Proposal to change the revisit design for prairie communities in the Heartland Network. Heartland Inventory and Monitoring Network. Republic, Missouri
A goal of long-term monitoring in prairie communities is to track changes in density of species, along with species composition and distribution. Currently foliar cover estimates collected during two sample events within a single year are combined and used to measure change in species abundance. Recent work has resulted in an analytic method that fully utilizes nested frequency data. This method uses frequency data reported at the optimized scale for each species, which provides a more accurate surrogate for inferring and monitoring change in species density through time. Employing this method no longer requires warm season foliar cover estimates, rather only frequency measures that can be obtained earlier in the growing season. The proposed change to the prairie community revisit design will result in better estimates of species density while reducing personnel time and costs. Here it is proposed to reduce the sampling of prairie communities to include only the cool season sample event for each sample year. This change would eliminate the second sample event of the revisit design while keeping the timing of the cool season event unchanged.
- Type
- Unpublished Report
- Authors
- James, Kevin; Morrison, Lloyd; DeBacker, Mike
- Date of Issue
- 2009
- Publisher
- Heartland Inventory and Monitoring Network
- Units
- HTLN