2011)—are rarely feasible. Typically, only small portions of the landscape can be surveyed (Stohlgren et
this website al. 1997). A common approach therefore is to rely on a stratified random sampling design and then www.selleckchem.com/products/E7080.html extrapolate data across the landscape (Stohlgren et al. 1997; Rosenstock et al. 2002). Here, we present a protocol to assess the effects of survey effort on the detection of biodiversity patterns based on a case study. We show that for our data survey efforts per site could be moderately reduced, because the corresponding increase in bias was relatively small and relative biodiversity patterns remained stable. Such a reduction, however, needs to happen in a sensible and balanced way in order to assure sufficient statistical power to detect environmental effects on species richness. Also, this conclusion is based on the assumption that detection probability
does not vary spatially. Overall, our findings are broadly consistent with a range of previous works from different systems. For example, Stohlgren et al. (1997) tested reducing a larger set of plant sample replicates in different vegetation communities in the Rocky Mountains and found that already ten quadrats of one CP673451 purchase square meter per sampling unit provided sufficient information in order to detect fine-scale patterns of plant diversity. Similarly, other studies showed that in Australia and California, most animal species that were surveyed could be detected even if survey effort within a given sampling protocol was reduced to three repeat surveys (Pellet 2008; Field et al. 2005).
Based on an assessment of birds, amphibians and invertebrates in Australia, Tyre et al. (2003) further suggested that with current survey methods, sampling from 100 sites and pooling data over three repeats yielded accurate results. This, too, is consistent with our findings—using 100 or more sites led to minimum detectable effects of changes in species richness in response to heterogeneity of three species for plants and butterflies, and one species for birds. Due to the coherences with findings from other studies, we assume our sampling protocol for landscape-scale surveys is applicable to other study Ketotifen systems as well. Our results suggest that it can be reasonable to reduce survey effort per site when aiming at broad patterns of biodiversity and when the detectability of investigated taxa is high. Moreover, even a low survey effort per site can yield high statistical power provided that the survey effort per site is balanced in a meaningful way with the number of sites surveyed. A key advantage of using many sites is that data then is much more likely to be representative of the study area as a whole, which is valid at least for occurrence patterns of organisms with relatively high abundance and detectability.