Design-based asymptotics for two-phase sampling strategies in environmental surveys

Abstract

SUMMARY We analyse design-based properties of two-phase strategies for estimating totals and nonlinear functions of totals for environmental populations when the sampling schemes are uniquely determined by points placed in the study region. In the first phase, points are located using tessellation stratified sampling, whereas in the second phase a finite population sampling scheme is adopted. We give sufficient conditions on second-phase designs that ensure consistency, and we investigate the variance convergence rate for some familiar schemes.