Dear Francesco,

I suggest you take the total amount of available sprouts into consideration, too. Just working with percentages can easily lead to erroneous statements. E.g.: if you have a low density of roe deer and a small number of sprouts you may have the same browsing index, but the impact on the productivity of the coppice (or species composition, ...) can be very different. If you are interested in sprouts, you want to assess winter browsing. There, you can do an inventory in spring (if other ungulates are excluded), either total area counts or a sampling approach based on the situation you have on your research fields. Without knowledge about your trials, landscape structure etc. I can only guess.

Concerning the test: Don't try to find a test and then construct the field work in a way that it fits the test - work the other way round. Some statisticians may and will disapprove, but in my experience it is easier to find a methodology to work with non-ideal data than to make first estimates of everything beforehand and force your data to fit the methodology if you overlooked something

In case you can get them, weather data can be helpful, as also data on other forage sources (neighbouring areas, land-use) and structure (research field, landscape).

Best regards

Joachim

Thank you very much for your response. I believe an available sprout assessment should not be so easy to fulfil, because my scenarios are very large, but I will think about the topic. In addition, I would try to search available data on other forage sources (maybe from corine land cover information?!) as well as structure, road distance and so on. I believe that gis data (if available) can help me "beyond the field work"... Thank you