Advantages and disadvantages
Marking, locating and identifying individuals can be very time-consuming and detailed work in a dense population, especially where the plants are small. Despite this you must always take great care to disturb the plants as little as possible because you may alter their survival and growth by the process of measuring them. Permanent markers will move over time due to soil movement (e.g. frost heave) and intentional or accidental interference from animals. Therefore, as time passes the position of a plant relative to the quadrat will change and mapped individuals may be lost or misidentified. This is a real problem only for dense populations. Certain types of markers may be lost through vandalism or interference from other animals. For instance, wire rings are lost very easily from grazed grass tillers. You should consider this problem and make the markers as permanent as possible. In most cases it is best both to map and to mark the individuals, either as a check that the mapping method has found the correct individual or as an aid to finding the marked plants. If an individual is only mapped or if the marker is not fixed to the plant then, if the plant dies and anew plant grows up in the same place between censuses, you might mistake this new individual for the old one. New individuals may grow through wire rings to create the same problem. You must decide on the likelihood of this happening in relation to the vegetation type (low in forests, high in fertile grasslands) and the frequency of censuses. In mapping by digital photography you must ensure that the camera is always perpendicular to the plot surface. If the angle varies between censuses, the relative positions of plants will appear to change. If the canopy height changes or certain individuals become smaller, the photograph will not detect those plants which have become hidden under the canopy.
Biases
The loss of markers or poor mapping may lead to underestimation of the survival of individ- uals. Misidentification of new individuals for old, dead ones may lead to overestimation of survival.