Spatial Relationship of Vegetation Carbon Stock and Soil Organic Matter at Serra da Mantiqueira

We aimed to analyze the spatial behavior of carbon present in the stems of trees (ECV) and soil organic matter (OM) in a dense ombrophilous forest at Serra da Mantiqueira, MG, using kriging. Also we tested the use of superficial organic matter as auxiliary variable in predicting ECV by cokriging. In order to achieve this, we analyzed georeferenced data from 25 sampling points of soil organic matter in three depths, 0-20 cm (P1), 20-50 cm (P2) and 50-100 cm (P3) and 12 vegetation sample plots of 400 m². All variables presented spatial dependence structure (higher ECV and lower OM at P1). The cross semivariogram reflected the spatial correlation between ECV and OM at P1. The interpolation map generated by cokriging provided good notion of general ECV trends keeping the same patterns as the one generated by ordinary kriging for this variable. Our findings pointed that in our studied area, OM at P1 can be used as a covariate for ECV prediction of where ECV is under sampled.

atlantic forest; univariate geostatistics; multivariate geostatistics