COMPARING TWO DIFFERENT SPATIAL INTERPOLATION APPROACHES TO CHARACTERIZE SPATIAL VARIABILITY OF SOIL PROPERTIES IN TUZ LAKE BASIN-TURKEY.

The mam objective of this study is to compare the performance of two interpolation approaches, namely Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and Or­dinary Kriging (OK) methods, for mapping spatial distribution of soil characteristics including electri­cal conductivity (EC), organic matter, phosphorus, lime and boron in the Tuz Lake Basin of Turkey. A total number of 312 soil samples were used for anal­yses, in which 80% of the data was employed to gen­erate interpolation models; whereas, the rest 20% was engaged for validation of the estimated outputs. Additionally, linear regression analysis was per­formed for further comparative evaluation. The re­sults demonstrate that OK provided better results than IDW in estimating lime and EC parameters. On the other hand, IDW provided better results in esti­mating phosphorus, organic matter and boron. Both methods are useful to produce areal maps of the re­lated soil parameters by using discrete number of point observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]