This exercise was developed  to complement the film The National Parks of Texas by Texas PBS & Villita Media. In this activity, students will learn about estimating the number of trees in a large area based on a smaller area. 

This is one way statisticians measure forests and other wide expanses of land. It's also a great way to illustrate how polling works. Scientists will interview a smaller sample size of Americans, rather than every single American, and then make estimations based on their results. In the same way, we counted smaller samples of trees, rather than all of the trees individually to get an estimate of how many trees are in the park total.