Public Parks

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hdelaconcha
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Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2016 8:10 pm
Location: Mexico
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Public Parks

Post by hdelaconcha » Wed Sep 14, 2016 9:19 am

I am getting ready to start data gathering and something came up, the city of Merida wants to know about the public parks in detail for some reason. There are 600 or so parks with areas of 1000 sqm to 10,000 m2, with not so many trees in them, so now my question is how should I treat this request?? I see two options:
1) Include a strata for the parks and have some plots randomly set to sample? but should all the parks be in on stratum or one per park?

or


2) Do a complete separately study that could be a complete inventory per park, but do this also mean I need to do an analysis park by park??

thanks for your info, and clearing up the difference between Strees and Eco.
Horacio de la Concha
Horacio de la Concha
AGRINET SA de CV
Cuernavaca MEXICO
hdelaconcha@agrinet.com.mx
Jason.Henning
i-Tree Team
Posts: 340
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 7:45 am

Re: Public Parks

Post by Jason.Henning » Wed Sep 14, 2016 12:48 pm

Hi Horacio,
We often get requests similar to this one. In fact we will be publishing a study for Philadelphia, PA, USA that was exactly this case and the report has a section dedicated to parks. I think you are correct about the two options as well.

For option 1 I don't think you will get useful results if you set up each park as its own strata because you likely won't have enough plots in anyone park that you will end up with large enough sample size to make accurate park level estimates. We generally recommend that you try ensure that you have at least 20 plots in each strata.

For option 2 you do not need to create a separate project for each park. i-Tree Eco v6 actually has an option to do a "stratified" complete inventory. During project set-up you can set-up each park as its own strata with its own area (in hectares) and then during data collection you would just record the park for each tree. You could then get results for all of your parklands combined as well as individual parks. It is important to note that your parklands complete inventory project would be separate from your plot-based citywide project but you would only have two projects when you are done.

I think deciding between these two approaches probably depends most on the group you are are working with. If they are interested in a summary for all their parklands combined then you can probably use option 1 and just have a parkland strata in your plot sample based project. You should probably go with option 2 if they are interested in comparing the structure and function of the forest from one park to the next or if they want results on an individual park basis. There is also the practical consideration that measuring all trees on 600 parks will likely take much more time than measuring 20 or more plots.

Thanks for your questions.
-Jason
A member of the i-Tree Team
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