Question for the field biologists in here.

I am responsible for performing monitoring on some sensitive habitat restoration areas, and one of the things I look at is invasive species coverage. My question is, when performing my invasive assessments, should I count plants that were treated by herbicides recently and so appear dead (brown, crispy, all that) but that I have a high degree of certainty will regrow by the next growing season? Many invasives will just laugh after the first or second herbicide treatment, and I don't want to misrepresent results to make it seem that infestation rates are lower than they actually are, but I have sample plots where the coverage of reed canary grass could be anywhere from <5% to over 75% depending on if I should count the recently treated plants or not.

 

What do y'all do?

Not a field biologist here, but wouldn't it be the easiest to count them into separate categories? That way you do not lose data but can present the difference in findings using either measure.