Comparative Experiments with Field Crops is a guide on how to organize comparative experiments about field crops. The book is divided into two parts. Part I deals with how to do and interpret field experiments; the planning of field experiments and special considerations to take into mind; the marking out, sowing, counting, and scoring of field crops; and the harvest as well as sampling. Part II covers the statistics involved in field experiments, and include comparisons and degrees of freedom and error; multidimensional geometry; regression analysis; and analysis of covariance. The text is recommended for agriculturists and botanists who intend to make a comparative study on field crops and are in need of a reference.

This volume describes practical techniques for conducting field experiments. The style is relaxed and enjoyable to read, with new chapters concerning difficult sites; how to arrange tests that can help solve farmers' immediate problems; and patterns of fertility and their study in statistical analysis by numerical and graphical methods. The emphasis is on understanding statistics without the use of detailed mathematical formulae; researchers with little statistical training and scientists planning trials will find this work invaluable.

This book should be on the shelf of every practising statistician who designs experiments. Good design considers units and treatments first, and then allocates treatments to units. It does not choose from a menu of named designs. This approach requires a notation for units that does not depend on the treatments applied. Most structure on the set of observational units, or on the set of treatments, can be defined by factors. This book develops a coherent framework for thinking about factors and their relationships, including the use of Hasse diagrams. These are used to elucidate structure, calculate degrees of freedom and allocate treatment subspaces to appropriate strata. Based on a one-term course the author has taught since 1989, the book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses. Examples, exercises and discussion questions are drawn from a wide range of real applications: from drug development, to agriculture, to manufacturing.

Comparison is a powerful cognitive research tool in science since it does "across studies" to evaluate similarities and differences, e.g. across taxa or diseases. This book deals with comparative research on plant disease epidemics. Comparisons are done in specifically designed experiments or with posterior analyses. From the apparently unlimited diversity of epidemics of hundreds of diseases, comparative epidemiology may eventually extract a number of basic types. These findings are very important to crop protection. Plant disease epidemiology, being the ecological branch of plant pathology, may also be of value to ecologists, but also epidemiologists in the areas of animal or human diseases may find interesting results, applicable to their areas of research.