For each of the last 10 years, your team has been collecting data from a...

 Independence is an assumption of linear regression that states that the errors (residuals) of the model are independent of each other, meaning that they are not correlated or influenced by previous or subsequent errors. Independence can be violated when the data has serial correlation or autocorrelation, which means that the value of a variable at a given time depends on its previous or future values. This can happen when the data is collected over time (time series) or over space (spatial data). In this case, the data is collected over time from a group of subjects, which may introduce serial correlation among the errors.