Reduction of Sample Size in the Soil Physical-Chemical Attributes Using the Multivariate Effective Sample Size

Abstract

Financial investment with collection and laboratory analysis of soil samples is an important factor to be considered when mapping agricultural areas with soybean planting. One of the alternatives is to use the spatial autocorrelation between the sample points to reduce the number of elements sampled, thus restricting the collection of redundant information. This work aimed to reduce the sample size of this agricultural area, composed of 102 sample points, and use it to analyze the spatial dependence of soil macro- and micro- nutrients, as well as the soil penetration resistance. The agricultural area used in this study has 167.35 ha, cultivated with soybean, which the soil is Red Dystroferric Latosol, and the sampling design has used in this agricultural area is the lattice plus close pairs. The reduction of the sample size was made by the multivariate effective sample size (ESS_multi) methodology. The studies with the simulation data and the soil attributes showed an inverse relationship between the practical range and the estimated value of the univariate effective sample size. With the calculation of ESS_multi, the sample configuration was reduced to 53 points. The Overall Accuracy and Tau concordance index showed differences between the thematic maps elaborated with the original and reduced sampling designs. However, the analysis of the variance inflation factor and the standard error of the spatial dependence parameters showed efficient results with the resized sample size.