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A Comparison Of Models And Designs For Experiments With Nonlinear Dose-Response Relationships, Shengjie Guo, W. W. Stroup, E. T. Paparozzi, M. E. Conley

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Research investigating dose-response relationship is common in agricultural science. Animal response to drug dose and plant response to amount of irrigation, pesticide, or fertilizer are familiar examples. This paper is motivated by plant nutrition research in horticulture. Plant response to level of nutrient applied is typically sigmoidal, i.e. no response at very low levels, observable response at mid-levels, point-of-diminishing returns and plateau at high levels. Plant scientists need accurate estimates of these response relationships 1) to determine lower threshold below which plants show deficiency symptoms and 2) to determine upper point-of-diminishing returns, above which excessive doses are economically and environmentally …