Stratified Sampling Frame in GIS

Sampling, which is supposed to provide adequate and unbiased representation of a study interest, is often faced with challenges such as choice of the minimum cost-effective sampling size, accurate location of sampling sites and statistical justification of both location of the sites and accuracy of the sampling process. Although there are many statistical sampling protocols in the literature, they largely emphasize on accuracy tests for unbiased sampling size. There is still a lack of statistical routines for unbiased sample locations. This has led to a lot of errors in spatial modeling of many environmental processes LHS is a robust and efficient statistical framework that has been widely used to guide the determination of sample sizes given a set of constraints. When combined with GIS software such as ArcView, LHS can improve sample size selection and subsequent unbiased strategic location of the samples in the landscape. ArcView scripts were written in avenue language for various applications in environmental engineering. The scripts were then integrated into one unit to produce the LHS extension in ArcView GIS.