Comparison of different statistical techniques for assessing soil heterogeneity

Abstract

A uniformity trial on colocasia was conducted at the College of Agriculture, Vellayani, Kerala Agricultural University, during kharif 1984. Biometrical observations on 16 characters as indicated in Tables 1,2 and 3 were taken from all plants. The nature of soil heterogeneity was studied from the productivity contour map. The map revealed that the field could be considered heterogeneous in nature. Based on the mean square analysis, we could not predict any general trend of fertilty variation existing in the field. The low serial correlation coefficients established that fertile areas occur in patches. The'b' value was found higher for yield than for other characters. While comparing all the four methods we could assume that the method of serial correlation, is more reliable than all other methods.