Investigation of Spatial Variation of Some Soil Properties Using Geostatistical Methods (Case study: Margon Town, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, Iran)

The aim of this study was to investigate the spatial variation of some soil properties such as soil texture, organic carbon content, soil pH and electrical conductivity (EC) using geostatistical methods in Margon town, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, Iran. For this purpose, 58 surface soil samples (0-30 cm depth) were prepared from the studied area and some physical and chemical characteristics of the soils were measured. The studied properties were estimated by various interpolation methods including ordinary kriging, simple kriging, disjunctive kriging, co-kriging, and inverse distance weighting (IDW) using GIS software. The capability of these methods was evaluated by the mean absolute error (MAE), and the root mean square error (RMSE). Based on the absolute mean error and the squared mean squared error, the spherical model for pH, salinity, sand percentage and soil silt percentage and the exponential model for clay and organic carbon percentage had the highest accuracy. Moreover, the results indicated that conventional co-kriging method for organic carbon percentage content and soil pH, simple co-kriging method for clay and silt percentage, simple kriging method for soil EC, and conventional kriging method for sand percentage were the most suitable methods as compared to the other studied methods.