All Categories : Technical Papers : 2005 ESRI User Conference Proceedings

Peirson's Milk-Vetch is an endangered plant species that occurs on the Algodones Dunes in the Imperial Valley of California. John Willoughby, a BLM botanist, devised a systematic random sampling design for monitoring the occurrence of the plant over time. The sampling is stratified by 12 sample areas within eight management areas. The design requires 135 transects with a total length of 930 km and 37,169 sample points 25 meters apart. This paper will discuss the algorithm used to generate the sampling scheme and the code required to implement the design in both AML and ArcObjects. The two methods are compared in terms of complexity and performance.