The effect of spatiotemporal sampling strategies and dataacquisition accuracy on the characterization of a dynamic ecologicalsystem

摘要

Ecosystems generally have a great number of interacting processes,and their characteristics can vary rapidly across both space and time.With such complexity, it can be difficult to collect sufficient data toadequately understand the behaviour of the observed system. This paperdescribes a method being used to examine the relationship betweensampling accuracy and classification fuzziness. A simulation model actsas a surrogate for a “real-world” resource-habitat system.Samples are collected from the running simulation according to differentclassification schemes, and the ability to map species habitat byresource levels from each sample are compared to the actual simulationbehaviour. The balance between sampling accuracy and the vaguenesswithin the classification scheme compared to the complexity of themodelled system is discussed