Accuracy Assessments of Stochastic and Deterministic Interpolation Methods in Estimating Soil Attributes Spatial Variability

Abstract

ABSTRACTSpatial interpolation methods are frequently used to characterize soil attributes’ spatial variability. However, inconclusive results, about the comparative performance of these methods, have been reported in the literature. Therefore, the present study aimed to analyze the efficiency of ordinary kriging (OK) and inverse distance weighting (IDW) methods in estimating the soil penetration resistance (SPR), soil bulk density (SBD), and soil moisture content (SM) using two distinct sampling grids. The soil sampling was performed on a 5.7 ha area in Southeast Brazil. For data collection, a regular grid with 145 points (20 x 20 m) was created. Soil samples were taken at a 0.20 m layer depth. In order to compare the accuracy of OK and IDW, another grid was created from the initial grid (A), by eliminating one interspersed line, which resulted in a grid with 41 sampled points (40 x 40 m). Results showed that sampling grid A presented less errors than B, proving that the more sampling points, the lower the errors that are associated with both methods will be. Overall, the OK was less biased than IDW only for SBD (A) and SM (B) maps, whereas IDW outperformed OK for the other attributes for both sampling grids.