I've got a completly randomized block design with three treatments and four replications. Biodiversity was measured in four successive years.

I figured that a mixed model with repeated measures as random terms should be appropriate to analyse this design.

My hypothesis is that considering all years, biodiversity is different between the treatments.

This is my analysis:

    library(nlme)
    library(multcomp)
    # Made-up random dataset
    mydata <- data.frame(
      Treatment=rep(c("Control", "Irrigation", "Fertailization"), 16), 
      Block=rep(1:4, 12), 
      Year=rep(2000:2003, 12), 
      Value=runif(48, 0.5, 1.5)
    )
    # Model Treatment is a fixed effect, Year is a random effect
    fit <- lme(Value ~ Treatment,  random = ~1|Year, data = mydata)
    # Post-hoc comparison
    summary(glht(fit,linfct=mcp(Treatment="Tukey")))


My questions:

  1. Is my model correct?

  2. Is the post-hoc comparison appropriate?

  3. How could I include the bock effect?