Short course: Methods and criteria to recognize the structure of the spatial variability of soil properties
Giovanna Vessia, Wojciech Pula
In field investigations of physical, mechanical and hydraulic properties of soil successions are commonly performed for environmental and engineering applications. The inherent lithological heterogeneity of surficial deposits of soils, that are actually mixture, shows also spatial inherent variability of litho-type properties. This variability within single lithotype, results in a large scatter of point measures with depth, that cannot be reasonably explained only through the mean trend.
Some theoretical statistical approaches to explain the spatial variability structure have been developed in the past thirty years as well as many practical methods that quantifies the vertical scale of fluctuation and standard deviation of the most relevant physical and mechanical properties of homogeneous lithotypes.
This short course will illustrate some practical methods and criteria to calculate the point variance of continuous in field measurements associated with the mean trend of some soil properties.