Although successfully applied during the past few decades for predicting the spatial occurrences of properties that are cloaked from direct observation, geostatistical methods remain somewhat of a mystery to practitioners in the environmental and geotechnical fields. The techniques are powerful analytical tools that integrate numerical and statistical methods with scientific intuition and professional judgment to resolve conflicts between conceptual interpretation and direct measurement. This paper examines the practicality of these techniques within the entitles field of study and concludes by introducing a practical case study in which the geostatistical approach is thoroughly executed.

The science of geostatistics is now being employed in an increasing number of disciplines in environmental sciences. This book surveys the latest applications of Geostatistics in a broad spectrum of fields including air quality, climatology, ecology, groundwater hydrology, surface hydrology, oceanography, soil contamination, epidemiology and health, natural hazards, and remote sensing.

GeoENV96, the First European Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications held in Lisbon, was conceived to bring together researchers, mostly from, but not limited to Europe, working on environmental issues approached by geostatistical methods. Papers were attracted from fields as diverse as hydrogeology. biology, soil sciences, air pollution or ecology. It is clear that there is a lot of activity on geostatistics for environmental applications as the collection of papers in this book reveals. GeoENV96 was successful in the number and quality of the papers presented which surpassed the initial expectations. There is still a large dispersion on the level of application of geostatistics in the different areas. To help in spreading the most novel applications of geostatistics across disciplines and to discuss the specific problems related to the application of geostatistics to environmental applications, geoENV96 is intended to set the pace and to be the first of a series of biennial meetings. The pace is set, now let us wait for geoENV98. Lisbon, November 1996 The Executive Committee: Jaime Gomez-Hernandez Roland Froidevaux Amflcar Soares TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword .................................................. Vll Hydrology, Groundwater, Groundwater Contaminantion Equivalent Transmissivities in Heterogeneous Porous Media under Radially Convergent Flow X. Sanchez-Vila, c.L. Axness and J. Carrera .......................... .

This volume contains selected contributions from geoENV III - the Third European Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Sciences, held in Avignon, France in November 2000. This third book of the geoENV series illustrates the new methodological developments in geostatistics, as applied to environmental sciences, which have occurred during the last two years. It also presents a wide variety of practical environmental applications which will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners. The book starts with two keynote papers on hydrogeology and on climatology and atmospheric pollution, followed by forty contributions. The content of this book is foremost practical. The editors have endeavored to compile a set of papers in which the readers could perceive how geostatistics is applied within environmental sciences. A few selected methodological and theoretical contributions are also included. The papers are organised in the following sections: Air Pollution / Climate; Environment; Health / Ecology; Hydrology; Methods; Soil Science / Site Remediation. presenting applications varying from delineation of hazardous areas, monitoring water quality, space-time modeling of sand beaches, areal rainfall estimation, air pollution monitoring, multivariate conditional simulation, soil texture analysis, fish abundance analysis, tree productivity index estimation, radionuclide migration analysis, wombling procedure, tracer tests modeling, direct sequential co-simulation to stochastic modeling of flow and transport. Audience: This publication will be of great interest and practical value to geostatisticians working both in academia and in industry.

This volume brings together selected contributions from geoENV 2008, the 7th International Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications, held in Southampton, UK. It presents the state-of-the-art in geostatistics for the environmental sciences.

The fourth edition of the European Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications (geoENV IV) took place in Barcelona, November 27-29, 2002. As a proof that there is an increasing interest in environmental issues in the geostatistical community, the conference attracted over 100 participants, mostly Europeans (up to 10 European countries were represented), but also from other countries in the world. Only 46 contributions, selected out of around 100 submitted papers, were invited to be presented orally during the conference. Additionally 30 authors were invited to present their work in poster format during a special session. All oral and poster contributors were invited to submit their work to be considered for publication in this Kluwer series. All papers underwent a reviewing process, which consisted on two reviewers for oral presentations and one reviewer for posters. The book opens with one keynote paper by Philippe Naveau. It is followed by 40 papers that correspond to those presented orally during the conference and accepted by the reviewers. These papers are classified according to their main topic. The list of topics show the diversity of the contributions and the fields of application. At the end of the book, summaries of up to 19 poster presentations are added. The geoENV conferences stress two issues, namely geostatistics and environmental applications. Thus, papers can be classified into two groups.