Improve the prediction of soil bulk density by cokriging with predicted soil water content as auxiliary variable

Abstract

Purpose Soil bulk density (SBD) is a key soil physical property affecting the transport of water and solutes, which is essential to estimating soil carbon and nutrient reserves. However, it is considered to be time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive to obtain in situ SBD data. Therefore, it is important to estimate SBD at an acceptable level of accuracy using auxiliary variables with limited field-measured data.