A new study conducted by Salvatore Arpaia, Ferdinando Baldacchino, Paul W. Goedhart, Martine Kos, Joop J.A. van Loon and Hilko van der Voet from AMIGA project has been published with the title “La natura dei dati entomologici di campo e implicazioni per le analisi statistiche”.
The aim of the study was to define an efficient model to support the evaluation of the environmental impacts of the adoption of different crop germoplasm, to verify the most suitable statistic model to represent the distribution of arthropods on vegetable crops and, finally, to estimate the necessary number of replications needed for designing an experiment with sufficient discriminatory power.
Studies have been conducted on fields in Italy (Metaponto) and The Netherlands (Wageningen) to verify how parasitoids, predators and insect pests were distributed on strawberries and cauliflower. The researchers concluded that the statistic model to be adopted has to take into consideration the over dispersion and a common excess of zeroes, that characterize several of the variables measured.
Hence, the statistic model used to evaluate the environmental impacts of agricultural treatments must take into consideration the above mentioned characteristics of ecological data. A prior analysis of the discriminatory power is also always necessary.
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