Green mathematics: Benefits of including biological variation in your data analysis

Biological variation is omnipresent in nature. It contains useful information that is neglected by the usually applied statistical procedures. To extract this information special procedures have to be applied. Biological variation is seen in properties (e.g. size, colour, firmness), but the underlying issue is almost always to the variation in development or maturity in a batch of individuals generated by small scale environmental differences. The principles of assessing biological variation in batches of individuals are explained without putting emphasis on mathematical details. Obtained explained parts increase from about 60 to 80 % for the usual approach to 95 when the biological variation is taken into account. When technical variation or measuring error is small even 99 % can be achieved. The benefit of the presented technology is highlighted based on a number of already published studies covering the colour of apples during growth and storage and the firmness of cut tomatoes during storage.