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Article
Heterogeneous Variances in Multi-Environment Yield Trials for Corn Hybrids
Crop Science
  • Massiel Andrea Orellana, Monsanto
  • Jode Edwards, United States Department of Agriculture
  • Alicia L. Carriquiry, Iowa State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
4-1-2014
DOI
10.2135/cropsci2013.09.0653
Abstract

Recent developments in statistics and computing have enabled much greater levels of complexity in statistical models of multi-environment yield trial data. One particular feature of interest to breeders is simultaneously modeling heterogeneity of variances among environments and hybrids. Our objective was to estimate the level of heterogeneity of genotype by environment interaction variance and error variance in the Iowa Crop Performance Test for Corn. A Bayesian approach was used to estimate variance components in a hierarchical model that allows for heterogeneous error and genotypeby- environment interaction (GEI) variances applied to corn yield data from the Iowa Crop Performance Test performed between 1995 and 2005. An average of 508 hybrids were tested per year with very little overlap between locations and years, which resulted in a very unbalanced data set. We divided the data into 16 subsets to study the effect of variability across locations and years. We found GEI and error variances to be heterogeneous among both environments and genotypes. Our results for corn contrasted previous work on oat (Avena sativa L.) in which very little heterogeneity was found for error variance among cultivars suggesting that different corn (Zea mays L.) hybrids can have different genotype by environment interaction variances and different error variances.

Comments

This article is from Crop Science 54 (2014): 1048, doi: 10.2135/cropsci2013.09.0653.

Rights
Works produced by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are not copyrighted within the U.S. The content of this document is not copyrighted.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Massiel Andrea Orellana, Jode Edwards and Alicia L. Carriquiry. "Heterogeneous Variances in Multi-Environment Yield Trials for Corn Hybrids" Crop Science Vol. 54 Iss. 3 (2014) p. 1048 - 1056
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/alicia_carriquiry/29/