Spatial prediction of soil water content in karst area using prime terrain variables as auxiliary cokriging variable

Abstract

In karst areas, accurately measuring and managing the spatial variability of soil water content (SWC) is very critical in settling numerous issues such as karst rocky desertification, ecosystem reconstruction, etc. In these areas, SWC exhibits strong spatial dependence, and it is a time and labor consuming procedure to measure its spatial variability. Therefore, estimation of this kind of soil property at an acceptable level of accuracy is of great significance. This study was conducted to evaluate and compare the spatial estimation of SWC by using ordinary kriging (OK) and cokriging (COK) methods with prime terrain variables, tending to predict SWC using limited available sample data for a 2,363.7 km2 study area in Mashan County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Southwest China. The measured SWC ranged from 3.36 to 26.69 %, with a mean of 17.34 %. The correlation analysis between SWC and prime terrain variables indicated that SWC showed significantly positive correlation with elevation (r is 0.46, P < 0.01), and significantly negative correlation with slope (r is −0.30, P < 0.01); however, SWC was not significantly correlated with aspect in the study area. Therefore, elevation and slope were used as auxiliary data together for SWC prediction using COK method, and mean error (ME) and root mean square error were adopted to validate the prediction of SWC by these methods. Results indicated that COK with prime terrain variables data was superior to OK with relative improvement of 28.52 % in the case of limited available data, and also revealed that such elevation and slope data have the potential to improve the precision and reliability of SWC prediction as useful auxiliary variables.