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A Method to Determine the Minimum Number of Litter Traps in Litterfall Studies 1
Author(s) -
Finotti Ricardo,
Freitas Simone Rodrigues,
Cerqueira Rui,
Vieira Marcus Vinícius
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
biotropica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.813
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1744-7429
pISSN - 0006-3606
DOI - 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2003.tb00595.x
Subject(s) - litter , plant litter , coefficient of variation , jackknife resampling , environmental science , statistics , atmospheric sciences , seasonality , resampling , zoology , mathematics , ecology , biology , ecosystem , geology , estimator
Litterfall was collected in a 0.64 ha area for three months, using 25 litter traps. Resampling methods were used to calculate the total litterfall mass grand mean and coefficient ofvariation (CV) for each month using different numbers of litter traps (2–25). Based on the variation of those two statistics, it was possible to determine the minimum number of litter traps necessary to achieve accuracy (variation in grand mean) and precision (magnitude of CV)