Spatial Distribution of Some Soil Properties, Using Geostatistical Methods in Khezrabad Region (Yazd) of Iran

Soil is an important compartment of the environment that is particularly easy to compromise, sensitive to shortand long-term pollution and directly affects sustainability of ecosystems and human health. A prerequisite of ecosystemmanagement decisions is monitoring of the spatial distribution of soil characteristics that geostatistics methods are oneof the most advanced techniques. In the present study, kriging, cokriging and IDW methods were used for prediction ofspatial distribution of salinity, water at saturation percentage, sodium adsorption ratio and percentage of sand, silt andclay in soils of Khezrabad region in Yazd province of Iran. After data normalization, the variograme was developed.For selecting the best model for competing on experimental variograme, the lower RSS value was used. The best modelfor interpretative was selected by means of cross validation and error evaluation methods, such as RMSE method. Theresults showed that kriging and cokriging methods were better than IDW method for prediction of soil properties.Moreover, soil texture and saturation percentage were better predicted by kriging method, where on, soil salinity andsodium adsorption ratio were better determined by cokriging method. The sum of Ca2++Mg2+ and Na+ concentrationwhich were highly correlated with soil salinity and sodium adsorption ratio, respectively, are used as auxiliaryparameters in this study. Finally, the soil characteristics maps were prepared, using the best interpolation method in GISenvironment.