Special Issue on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications

Abstract

Until the early 90s of the last century, environmental applications of geostatistics did not share the same shining stage as the mining and petroleum applications. In some way, the small number of papers in international conferences and researchers involved in the field reflected the concern and priority level that the society and the scientific community devoted to the environmental problems. On the other hand, the dominant mainstream of methods for approaching these problems—qualitative paradigms of analyzing natural resources (e.g., forest, biodiversity, soil), deterministic modeling for characterizing environmental issues (e.g., air pollution, climate, groundwater), statistical methods that did not privilege the space–time component of those phenomena—did not contribute much for changing this scenario. During the 90s, environmental problems like ozone depletion, greenhouse effect, global warming, loss of biodiversity, desertification and drought became global and public issues, changing the environmental risk perception of people radically. The United Nations conferences and summits, from Rio (1992) to Kyoto (1997), definitively pushed those points towards most countries’ agenda, leading to significant investments in research and development. Hence, the applications of quantitative methods (particularly in geostatistics) to monitor, manage, remediate and mitigate environmental resources became an appealing challenge for