NEAREST NEIGHBOUR ANALYSIS OF UNEQUALLY REPLICATED TRIALS

There has been much work on the use of neighbouring plots to control environmental variation in the analysis of agricultural field experiments. In particular, the Residual Maximum Likelihood Neighbour (REMLN) analysis of Gleeson&Cullis (1987) appears very promising. The application of the REMLN analysis to an unequally replicated field trial augmented with an additional variety planted every six plots in a grid system is here compared with a covariance (COV) analysis using the neighbouring grid or check plot values as the covariate. The results indicate that the REMLN analysis gives more accurate estimates of treatment contrasts than the COV analyses, but that the estimate of treatment means can be biased. The bias depends on the mean of the check plot. This bias can be removed by adjusting the estimates of the treatment means such that their average equals the average of the raw means rather than that of the raw data.