Multiscale Soil Investigations: Physical Concepts and Mathematical Techniques

Soil variability has often been considered to be composed of “functional” (explained) variations plus random fl uctuations or noise. However, the distinction between these two components is scale dependent because increasing the scale of observation almost always reveals structure in the noise (Burrough, 1983). Soils can be seen as the result of spatial variation operating over several scales, indicating that factors infl uencing spatial variability differ with scale. Th is observation points to variability as a key soil attribute that should be studied