Geostatistics for Environmental Applications

While the society becomes everyday more aware of environmental problems, the experts have to deal with a major issue: uncertainty due to incomplete data sets and spatio-temporal variability. Among the techniques used to quantify this un¬certainty and to improve environmental management, geostatistics is becoming a recognized standard, applied in fields as different as hydrogeology, remote sens¬ ing, ecology or soil contamination. In recent years, the domain of application ofthese techniques has regularly grown together with the wide availability of Geo¬graphical Information Systems and geostatistical software packages.This book is the outcome of the fifth edition of the European Conference onGeostatistics for Environmental Applications (geoENV V) held in Neuchatel (Switzerland) from October 13th to October 15th, 2004. The conference attracted more than 100 participants, mostly from Europe, but also from North America, South America, North Africa, Russia and Australia. Among the 140 abstracts submitted to the conference, the organization committee selected 53 for oral pres¬ entation and 40 for poster presentation.The book reflects the current status of the research in the field of geostatistics for environmental applications. It opens with one keynote paper by Carol Gotway-, which emphasizes the problem of the size of the data support when making spatial statistics. It is then followed by research papers, classified according to their main topics, that describe recent methodological advances and applications. All these papers have been presented orally during the conference and accepted by the reviewers. The final version of the papers were again checked by the editors.Also included in the book is a CDROM containing the original posters and the companion poster papers. This material has not been reviewed.Finally, the editors wish to thank all the reviewers and the authors withoutwhom this book could not exist, as well as the sponsors of the conference: theSwiss Federal Statistical Office