Herbicide bioassay

Abstract

Summary One of the most commonly used techniques to assess the efficacy of herbicides is to apply to the principle of bioassays. A bioassay is defined as an experiment for estimating the potency of a herbicide by analysis of the reaction that follows its application to living organisms. The analysis of variance is central to most applications of statistical methods in the analysis of experiments. This is true for bioassay, but perhaps the fundamental importance of regression and related concepts is here particularly apparent. The purpose of this presentation is to quantify herbicidal effects of applying non‐linear regression models to herbicide bioassays, and to demonstrate how some general hypotheses about the mode of action of the assayed herbicides can be incorporated into the regression models. The validity of herbicide bioassay data is discussed in view of the general principles used in bioassay in other biological sciences.