Spatial variability of trace elements in agricultural soils of Chongming, Shanghai(China)

This investigation was conducted to understand the spatial variability and distribution of trace metals in soil by using geostatistics combining with GIS. Chongming island of Shanghai, the world biggest narrow and long alluvial island was selected as the study area. The most spatially auto-correlated lag sizes and appropriate analytic scale were explored from detailed investigation for each factors . Universal Kriging was finally used to perform the interpolation of these trace metals after iterating the available fitting models on these scales, and hereby mapping of the spatial variability of soil trace metals were obtained. The results indicated that the content of Available Cu and Available Fe were extremely high in the whole extension, and Available Cu was distributed regionally higher in the northeastern region. The high content patches of Available Fe and Available Mn were generally aggregating in the southeast which are probably relevant to the osmotic pressure of coastal area. The results are valuable for precision agriculture and planning the management of land resource.