Geostatistics

Geostatistics has been defined broadly as the study of phenomena that vary over space. Developed originally to address problems of spatial prediction in the mining industry, the generality of the approach has led subsequently to its application in a diverse range of settings across the geographical, geological, atmospheric, environmental, and epidemiological sciences, among others. Geostatistics offers a collection of primarily probabilistic tools that have been developed to aid the understanding and modeling of spatial variability, with the principal motivation of predicting unsampled values dispersed in space (also termed interpolation). The origins of the discipline are generally traced back to the work of Daniel Krige and others on methods for gold and uranium reserve valuation in the Witwatersrand, South Africa, during the 1950s. These ideas were ...