I plan to set up several spore traps, at different locations, within a woodland infested with the fungal pathogen Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. These spore traps will capture the airborne spores of the pathogen on sticky tape, and qPCR analysis will quantify the amount of spores captured by each trap. The primary aim is to determine if the quantity of spores present in the air vary significantly between different locations within the woodland. Further, at each spore trap location, a datalogger will be recording the local humidity and temperature. This purpose of this is to assess if humidity and temperature is linked to the quantity of airborne spores. The number of spore traps which will be used is not yet determined, but is likely to be a maximum of 10 individual traps. Thus, the research questions I wish to answer are:

• Is there a significant difference in the quantity of airborne spores captured at different trapping sites?
• Does humidity and/or temperature influence the quantity of spores captured?

It is worth mentioning that even though I will not be using many individual traps (a maximum of 10) I can use the traps several different times over the season, thus providing quite an accurate estimation of the spore levels in the trapping locations.

I am struggling to determine the best statistical test for this data. I did consider a simple linear model, with the mean spore quantities at each trapping location providing a single input, but as I cannot realistically build and deploy more than 10 traps it seems the potential dataset will not meet the sample size requirements. Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.