Spatial Models for Field Trials

An important aim of the analysis of agricultural field trials is to obtain good predictions for genotypic performance, by correcting for spatial effects. In practice these corrections turn out to be complicated, since there can be different types of spatial effects; those due to management interventions applied to the field plots and those due to various kinds of erratic spatial trends. This paper presents models for field trials in which the random spatial component consists of tensor product Penalized splines (P-splines). A special ANOVA-type reformulation leads to five smooth additive spatial components, which form the basis of a mixed model with five unknown variance components. On top of this spatial field, effects of genotypes, blocks, replicates, and/or other sources of spatial variation are described by a mixed model in a standard way. We show the relation between several definitions of heritability and the effective dimension or the effective degrees of freedom associated to the genetic component. The approach is illustrated with large-scale field trial experiments. An R-package is provided