B0175
Title: Neighbour balance and evenness of distribution of treatment replications in row-column designs
Authors: Hans-Peter Piepho - Universitaet Hohenheim (Germany) [presenting]
Abstract: Row-column designs allow error control in field experiments by blocking in two dimensions. While this strategy can capture spatial heterogeneity aligned with blocks and account for effects due to the farming operations along rows and columns, it suffers from the occasional clustered occurrence of several replications of the same treatment. This property of classical row-column designs has hampered their more widespread use in practice. A further issue of practical importance is the degree of neighbor balance of a design, that is, the frequency of adjacencies of pairs of treatments. Two design strategies are proposed to simultaneously optimize the evenness of spatial distribution of treatment replication and neighbor balance. Three examples are given to illustrate the proposed methods and demonstrate that both approaches yield comparable and satisfactory results.