Hi. I am doing a morphometrics study on the shrub genus Cercis (Redbud). I did Elliptical Fourier Analysis on the shape of the leaves and subsequently ran a PCA on the harmonics. I included as many leaves per plant as I could from the herbarium samples. I then chose a representative leaf for each plant using a dice. In order to use a representative leaf my between plant variation in leaf shape needs to be higher that within plant. How can I test this?

Thanks!

Hi. I am doing a morphometrics study on the shrub genus Cercis (Redbud). I did Elliptical Fourier Analysis on the shape of the leaves and subsequently ran a PCA on the harmonics. I included as many leaves per plant as I could from the herbarium samples. I then chose a representative leaf for each plant using a dice. In order to use a representative leaf my between plant variation in leaf shape needs to be higher that within plant. How can I test this?

Thanks!

Do you want to validate the use of a single leaf per plant for your analysis?

One to do this would be with an one-way ANOVA. Meassure as many leafs per plant as possible and then run an ANOVA with your data. An ANOVA tests if the between group (in your case plant) variation is larger than the within group variation.

good luck