Applied Multivariate Techniques on Soil Parameters : Grouping of Villages Based on Soil Parameters

The present investigation was carried out to study the pattern of variability of five soil parameters simultaneously across the villages and to group the villages having same pattern by considering data of villages in eleven different talukas of Panchamahal district. The data on five soil parameters viz., pH, electrical conductivity , organic carbon, available P and K of the district obtained from Soil Health Card programme were subjected to various statistical analysis. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) technique was employed to test the significance of variation in each of the five soil parameters separately between the villages. To test the significance of variation based on all the five parameters simultaneously between the villages Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANAVO) technique was used. To take care of within variability of the village means, the different soil parameter means were converted into uncorrelated variables using the pivotal condensation method. The transformed uncorrelated variables were subjected to group the villages by Ward's method involving squared Euclidean distance.