The constant subspace has one statistical degree of freedom. Day contrasts have , and the within-block ANOVA stratum has . Because the orthogonal block design puts all four independent dose contrasts in that last ANOVA stratum, the residual has statistical degrees of freedom.
StratumSourceDegrees of freedom
MeanGrand mean1
Between daysDays4
Within daysDose4
Within daysResidual41
Uncorrected totalAll observations50
The corrected total has 49 statistical degrees of freedom; dose is tested against the within-day residual. The quantitative dose scale also permits the dose component to be split into linear, quadratic, cubic and quartic orthogonal polynomial contrasts, each with one statistical degree of freedom. This is optional and does not assume the response is linear in dose.
This produces a split-plot design: assign spray to whole orchards, with six sprayed and six unsprayed, then independently randomize ten trees to each pruning method inside every orchard. Orchards remain experimental units for spray; individual trees become experimental units for pruning. Pruning contrasts and the spray-by-pruning interaction term now lie in the within-block ANOVA stratum, while spray is tested between orchards.
The between-orchard ANOVA stratum has eleven statistical degrees of freedom, split into one for spray and ten for error. The within-orchard ANOVA stratum has 348, split into two for pruning, two for the interaction term and 344 for error. This pooling of within-orchard error is appropriate under the stated compound-symmetry covariance model; additional orchard-specific pruning variation would need its own variance component rather than this simplified error model.
The shared orchard effect cancels in a pruning difference within an orchard. Its variance is , so averaging across twelve orchards gives
The spray contrast still compares means of six orchards per group, each based on 30 trees, so its estimated variance remains . For a difference of pruning differences between the two spray groups, each group's pruning difference has estimated variance , and the resulting interaction contrast has estimated variance , compared with in the original allocation.
Splitting pruning within orchards improves pruning and interaction precision without extra trees, and gives spray a less sparse error estimate; it does not reduce the spray contrast's variance. This option requires tree-level pruning to be practical without interference between neighboring trees. The numerical gains, like those in the other options, assume the current variance components remain applicable next year.
The within-block ANOVA stratum contains response vectors whose coordinates sum to zero separately in every block. For blocks of size its dimension is . A shared additive block effect cancels in every vector in this subspace.