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How Soil, Plant, and Atmosphere Properties Vary in Space and Time in the SPAS: An Approach to Geostatistics

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Abstract

Spatial and temporal variability of attributes of the soil–plant–atmosphere system is analyzed in this chapter based on the classical statistics of Fisher and on geostatistics. Several specific concepts are introduced, like the sampling transects or grids. It is shown that the classical statistics and geostatistics complement each other. Mean or average, variance, standard deviation, quartiles, and moments of sampled populations are introduced in detail. Outliers of a set of collected data are defined and the criteria to eliminate them are presented. An introduction to the box plots technique, the normal frequency distribution, the lognormal distribution, covariance, autocorrelation, and semivariograms is also given. Finally, the concepts of kriging, pedotransfer functions, and neural networks are also introduced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura and Escola Superior de Agricultura “Luiz de Queiróz”, University of Sao Paulo, Piracicaba, São Paulo, Brazil

    Klaus Reichardt

  2. Rural Engineering Department, Faculty of Agronomy, Federal University of Pelotas, Capão do Leão, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Luís Carlos Timm

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  1. Klaus Reichardt
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Reichardt, K., Timm, L.C. (2020). How Soil, Plant, and Atmosphere Properties Vary in Space and Time in the SPAS: An Approach to Geostatistics. In: Soil, Plant and Atmosphere. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19322-5_17

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