Spatial variability analysis of soil properties within a field

Abstract

The main efforts and applications up to now are focused on the spatial variability analysis within a field. The spatial variability of soil properties within a field was evaluated using geostatistical analysis and the interpolation methods for mapping soil properties were compared in this paper. This experimentation was conducted in a wheat field of the trail farm in Shunyi County, Beijing. The soil properties tested were N, P, and K. The results suggested that the spatial variability of P were more obvious than N and K, the random sampling error of N was bigger than P and K, and the range of K was larger than N and P. The techniques of Kriging and Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) can significantly improve estimation precision compared with Spline technique. Comparison of Kriging and IDW estimations revealed that Kriging performed better than IDW. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.