Starting from the home page

1. Select a crop.
2. Choose a tool to explore the trials information (see below).
3. Click the 'Go' button.

Further information is to be found via links highlighted at the top of page for each tool:

• "Help" link : details of the various options along with examples;
• "Tour" link : a guided introduction to the facilities - recommended for first-time users.

To select another crop or tool at any stage click on the "Home" link at the top of the page.

Interactive-Recommended-List Tool

You can order varieties by the characters you feel are most important. For instance, if you think yield followed by Hagberg falling number are most important in selecting a wheat variety for your farm, click on the 'Yield' button and press 'Sort' button. All the RL varieties will be re-ordered. The highest yielding varieties appear first.

You can then identify the varieties you are most interested in and restrict the next sort to those by ticking the "sort only" boxes below their names. The varieties ticked will be sorted to the left at the next sort.

Alternatively, you may rank varieties on the basis of several characters simultaneously instead of in sequence, as above. For example, to select the varieties most resistant to mildew and having the highest yields, click first on the 'Mildew' button in the Sort column and then on the 'Yield' button. Finally click on 'Sort'. The varieties with the highest resistance score appear first and, where resistance scores are the same, they will be listed with the highest yielder appearing first. Up to four characters can be used to order varieties in this way but, unless there is a tie in the character before, an additional character will have no affect on the sort.

Varieties-on-your-farm Tool

You can check if there is evidence from trials that a variety may perform better or worse than its UK average in circumstances that reflect those on your farm.

1. Select the varieties you want by clicking them in the box 1. The Group buttons will select all recommended varieties in each nabim group. Varieties for which we have data, but which are not on the HGCA Recommended List, appear at the bottom of the list and can be reached by scrolling down.
2. Select which characters you wish to look at from Box 2.
3. Specify the conditions where the crop will be grown and select the characters you are interested in. Please choose only the one or two conditions that you think are most likely to be critical. (You may repeat the process choosing other combinations of conditions to explore how important these might be).
4. To restrict consideration to trials in your part of the country click on the map to identify your location.  NB. If this option is chosen then only one of the growing condition characters may be specified above.
5. Press the Start button to commence calculations.

• All_trials - This is similar to UK results in the current HGCA Recommended List but is calculated over a 10-year period so may not be quite the same as the tabulated values. It also shows the number of trials on which the mean is based;
• Selected - Estimates of variety performance under conditions which you have specified together with the number of trials exactly fulfilling those conditions. Estimates reflect the evidence from trials on variety performance under your chosen conditions but also draw on data which might not exactly fit the conditions you have specified. If there is limited data for a particular variety the program will still give a "Selected" result but this will be very close to the "All_trials" mean.
• Statistically significant differences between Selected and All_trials are highlighted with + or - symbols. A plus sign indicates that a variety performs significantly better under the Selected conditions than on average throughout the UK. A minus sign denotes significantly poorer performance. The strength of the evidence for a significant difference is indicated by increasing numbers of + or - symbols.
  NB. Small differences may occur between All_trials and Selected but should be discounted unless highlighted with + or - symbols.
• Displayed on the map are the locations of trials used in the calculations for the last variety in the table. Trials which meet the Selected conditions have a black dot while other trials are assigned a green dot. If you have specified an area from which trials are to be selected then its boundary will be marked with an arc. Should you wish to view the trial sites available for a particular variety then re-run the program having selected only that variety.
  

Speed of calculations will depend on how many conditions you select. Very specific queries may take a few minutes. If you are not prepared to wait then click on the 'Stop' button.

View-trials-data-in-detail Tool

Results from individual trials can be inspected with this option.

1. Select the varieties you want by clicking them in the box 1.
2. Select which character you wish to look at from Box 2.
3. The buttons at 3 allow you to choose to list all trials which contain any of the selected varieties or to restrict it to only trials which contain all of the varieties. If you choose the "Trials with all varieties" button and you get no data returned then all the varieties chosen have never been grown together in the same trial. You should re-run with "All trials" selected to see exactly what data is available.
4. To restrict consideration to trials in your part of the country then click on the map to identify your location and type into the 'km' box the distance from that point to the boundary of the area restricted. 100km or 200km have proved to be good values to use.
5. Select the conditions in 4. There are no restrictions to the number of conditions you select but there may easily be no trials that satisfy all conditions. If you don't select anything in a box then that box will be ignored by the program.
   
6. Press the Start button to select the data.

The program displays results trial-by-trial.

NB. Means at the top of the table are simple averages of columns beneath. They are not the best estimates of relative variety performance: for this you should use the 'Interactive Recommended List' or 'Varieties on your farm' pages. However, these means do give you a useful head-to-head comparisons of varieties tested under similar conditions.

Disease-and-lodging-risk Tool

This tool is currently only available for winter wheat. It is described in its own help file

Saving and printing the output

It may be possible to print the sorted "Interactive Recommended List" table by selecting File->Print or to capture a screen-shot of the table but this module is really designed to be viewed on-screen.

In "Varieties on your farm" and "View trials data in detail" the contents of the results window can be highlighted, copied and pasted into a spreadsheet for further examination or printing.

Browser requirements

Browsers must be capable of running Java (version 1.1 onwards) and Javascript, and handling pop-up windows.

The RL-Plus pages have been tested on versions of Netscape 4.6 and later, Internet Explorer 5.1 and later, and Opera 6.0. They are not guaranteed to work on older versions or other browsers.