SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF SOME SOIL PHYSIOCHEMICAL PROPERTIES IN KALABSHOW FARM USING GEOSTATISTICS

eostatistics provides valuable tools to characterize the spatial distribution of soil properties. Kriging techniques rely on the spatial dependence between observations to predict attribute values at un-sampled locations. These techniques were used to study the spatial distribution of some soil physiochemical properties at the experimental farm of MansouraUniversity, Kalapshow, Bilqas District, Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt. Ordinary Kriging (OK) was used to surface interpolate soil clay, available water, EC, bulk density, soil organic matter (SOM), soluble K, exchangeable K and available K.
Soil clay in the studied area varied from 1.23 to 9.17%. These values were associated with the conventional management practices of adding clay to these sandy textured soils. Available water was very low and varied from 6.49 to 9.87%. This is expected due to the relatively low clay content, and consequently low water holding capacity. Soils in the studied were non-saline, where EC values ranged between 1.09 and 3.09 dSm^-1. Bulk density values ranged from 1.33 to 1.54. The pH values ranged from 8.03 to 8.19 in saturation soil paste. SOM was low and ranged between 0.35 and 0.96%. Soluble K varied from 0.12 to 0.26 meq.L^-1, whereas exchangeable k varied from 0.12 to 0.55 Cmol.kg-1. Studied soils ranged between low (52 ppm) and moderate (178 ppm) in available K. Clay content had highly significant correlations (p=0.001) with exchangeable k, available k, available water, and SOM (r= 0.93, 0.91, 0.81, and 0.55, respectively).
It could be concluded from the spatial distribution of these physiochemical properties that higher values of available water, EC, SOM, and the three forms of soil k were highly associated with those areas that have high contents of clay, whereas lower values were related to areas higher in sand.