The effect of short-range spatial variability on soil sampling uncertainty

This paper aims to quantify the soil sampling uncertainty arising from the short-range spatial variability of elemental concentrations in the topsoils of agricultural, semi-natural, and contaminated environments. For the agricultural site, the relative standard sampling uncertainty ranges between 1% and 5.5%. For the semi-natural area, the sampling uncertainties are 2–4 times larger than in the agricultural area. The contaminated site exhibited significant short-range spatial variability in elemental composition, which resulted in sampling uncertainties of 20–30%.