Geostatistics for environmental monitoring and survey design

Geostatistics is a field of statistics which development to solve estimation problems in the mining industry. Geostatistical techniques, however, can also be useful in the environmental sciences. For example, one geostatistical technique, called kriging, can be used to obtain unbiased, minimum variance estimates of the spatial distribution of a pollutant. In this discussion, an introduction to kriging is presented. In addition, a brief review of some of the applications of kriging in the fields of hydrology and geohydrology, soil science, agronomy, and contaminant monitoring is presented.