USE OF GEOSTATISTICS IN DESIGNING AND ANALYZING TREATMENT EFFECTS AT THE FIELD SCALE

R.S. Govindaraju, M.K. Banks and A.P. Schwab

Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 66506, 913-532-1585


ABSTRACT

Determining the efficacy of treatment effects by replicated field trials is truly confounded by the presence of spatial variability in most field soils. It is not possible to construct two field sites which are perfectly alike with respect to their soil properties and initial contaminant concentrations. When the treatments involve vegetative remediation strategies, this problem is further aggravated by the additional uncertainty introduced by factors like root density. Geostatistics provides us a powerful mathematical tool for designing, analyzing and comparing treatment effects. It has been demonstrated that inclusion of information on covariance structure of spatially varying quantities (in this case contaminant concentrations) increases the statistical power of hypothesis tests. Some applications of geostatistics to actual design and implementation of field sites will be presented.

KEY WORDS

spatial variability, hypothesis testing, geostatistics

This paper is from the Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Hazardous Waste Research 1995, published in hard copy and on the Web by the Great Plains/Rocky Mountain Hazardous Substance Research Center.