Hi, I am trying to figure out how to specify the model for a repeated measures experiment using lme. I have the following structure for the experiment: There are 3 sites and at each site there are two depths, so site and depth are crossed. At each site and depth there are 12 fragments of Coral, each representing a seperate genotype, so genotype is crossed with site and depth. On each coral fragment the size of 6 coralites is measured so coralite is nested in fragment. Now in the model genotype should be a random effect, and we are trying to measure the effect of depth and site. So I fit the model mod1<-lme(Factor1~Islands*Depths+Frags:Depths+Frags:Islands + Frags:Depths:Islands,dhfactan,random=~1|Frags/Corallites) and anova(mod1) numDF denDF F-value p-value (Intercept) 1 289 0.000000 1.0000 Islands 2 289 2.503565 0.0836 Depths 1 289 10.022984 0.0017 Islands:Depths 2 289 3.772553 0.0241 Depths:Frags 22 289 7.970114 <.0001 Islands:Frags 22 289 7.806390 <.0001 Islands:Depths:Frags 22 289 6.554670 <.0001 Now I know I have done something wrong here becuase there seem to be far too many degrees of freedom in the denominator. I am not sure if this is due to how I coded the data frame or how I specified the model. The data frame looks like Corallites Frags Islands Depths Factor1 1 1 1 1 1 0.9476487 2 2 1 1 1 0.4810762 3 3 1 1 1 -0.2544952 4 4 1 1 1 -0.3711468 5 5 1 1 1 -1.0486175 6 6 1 1 1 -0.9323673 7 1 2 1 1 0.6410660 8 2 2 1 1 0.7590714 9 3 2 1 1 2.3403437 10 4 2 1 1 1.8750632 11 5 2 1 1 0.7945611 12 6 2 1 1 2.0533272 Where Factor1 is the response. Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks Nicholas