Patent ID: 6662185
Filing Date: 2003-12-09
Classification: A01G,G01V,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for assessing wide-area performance of two or more crop varieties using a linear mixed model that incorporates geostatistical components and includes parameters for fixed effects, random effects and covariances, the method comprising:constructing a wide-area database that includes spatial coordinates of testing locations of two or more crop varieties, performance trait values of two or more crop varieties at their respective testing locations and spatial coordinates of other geographic locations for assessing performance of two or more crop varieties; constructing a linear mixed model for the data in the wide-area database that includes modeling the large-scale performance of each of the two or more crop varieties by fixed effect trend surfaces, modeling spatial autocovariance among the random error components of each of the two or more crop varieties and modeling spatial crosscovariances of random errors among the two or more crop varieties in a mutivariate coregionalization model; estimating the parameters for the fixed effects, random effects and covariances by fitting the linear mixed model with data in the wide-area database; and estimating long-term expected performance of any of the two or more crop varieties for any of the one or more geographic locations using the pamtr estimates.