Improved Prediction and Reduction of Sampling Density for Soil Salinity by Different Geostatistical Methods

The spatial estimation for soil properties was improved and sampling intensities also decreased in terms of incorporated auxiliary data. In this study, kriging and two interpolation methods were proven well to estimate auxiliary variables: cokriging and regression-kriging, and using the salinity data from the first two stages as auxiliary variables, the methods both improved the interpolation of soil salinity in coastal saline land. The prediction accuracy of the three methods was observed under different sampling density of the target variable by comparison with another group of 80 validation sample points, from which the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (r) between the predicted and measured values were calculated. The results showed, with the help of auxiliary data, whatever the sample size of the target variable may be, cokriging and regression-kriging performed better than ordinary kriging. Moreover, regression-kriging produced on average more accurate predictions than cokriging. Compared with the kriging results, cokriging improved the estimations by reducing RMSE from 23.3 to 29% and increasing r from 16.6 to 25.5%, regression-kriging improved the estimations by reducing RMSE from 25 to 41.5% and increasing r from 16.8 to 27.2%. Therefore, regression-kriging shows promise for improved prediction for soil salinity and reduction of soil sampling intensity considerably while maintaining high prediction accuracy. Moreover, in regression-kriging, the regression model can have any form, such as generalized linear models, non-linear models or tree-based models, which provide a possibility to include more ancillary variables.