Experimental design issues and statistical evaluation techniques for site-specific management

This chapter discusses some of the important issues that have arisen in designing experiments to evaluate site-specific management (SSM), to clarify some of the statistical considerations inherent in these issues, and to provide statistical techniques and methodology useful for designing SSM experiments and analyzing the resulting data. Evaluation of SSM, the choice of experimental units, and blocking all require knowledge of field conditions that is relevant to variation known to affect the response variable of interest in the experiment. Any SSM technology must be evaluated across a range of conditions typical of those existing in a farmer’s field across a variety of climates and environmental conditions. In SSM, response surface methodology may be useful in designing experiments to identify and quantify important factors affecting SSM. The use of uniform fields for SSM experiments would clearly be undesirable since spatial variability is necessary for the optimal performance of variable rate treatments.