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Abstract The use of soil analyses to construct maps of soil properties and to identify areas of particular interest or requiring separate management, is important in soil science. Recent developments in geostatistics permit increased ability to summarize and interpret such soil analyses. Soil analyses from transects on the Island of Hawaii were used for estimating soil P sorption over the entire island by means of an optimal geostatistical technique called kriging. Displays of P sorption information obtained by kriging were compared with those obtained by a more common method of spline interpolation. The map of kriged points corresponded more closely with known soil behavior than did the spline map. Kriging further provided estimates of the reliability of the resulting map. Areas were identified where additional samples would be most useful in reducing the estimation variance which indicates map reliability. The necessity of considering nonstationarity and using universal kriging was evaluated. Universal kriging, either by prior polynomial trend removal or by local polynomial trend removal during estimation, was not beneficial in spite of widely varying P sorption and a significant polynomial trend in the data. Results suggest ordinary kriging is useful in summarizing and interpreting soil analyses and that ordinary kriging seems quite robust to certain degrees of nonstationarity.
Yost et al. (Wed,) studied this question.