Highlighting the potential of multilevel statistical models for analysis of individual agroforestry systems
Date
2023-07-09
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
Agroforestry is a land-use system that combines arable and/or livestock management with tree cultivation, which has been shown to provide a wide range of socio-economic and ecological benefits. It is considered a promising strategy for enhancing resilience of agricultural systems that must remain productive despite increasing environmental and societal pressures. However, agroforestry systems pose a number of challenges for experimental research and scientific hypothesis testing because of their inherent spatiotemporal complexity. We reviewed current approaches to data analysis and sampling strategies of bio-physico-chemical indicators, including crop yield, in European temperate agroforestry systems to examine the existing statistical methods used in agroforestry experiments. We found multilevel models, which are commonly employed in ecology, to be underused and under-described in agroforestry system analysis. This Short Communication together with a companion R script are designed to act as an introduction to multilevel models and to promote their use in agroforestry research.
Description
© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Agroforestry Systems, available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10457-023-00871-x . Keywords: alley cropping; research methods; transect sampling; multilevel models; spatial autocorrelation.
item.page.type
Article
item.page.format
Keywords
Citation
Golicz, K., Piepho, HP., Minarsch, EM.L. et al. Highlighting the potential of multilevel statistical models for analysis of individual agroforestry systems. Agroforest Syst 97, 1481–1489 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-023-00871-x