The Second European Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications took place in Valencia, November 18-20, 1998. Two years have past from the first meeting in Lisbon and the geostatistical community has kept active in the environmental field. In these days of congress inflation, we feel that continuity can only be achieved by ensuring quality in the papers. For this reason, all papers in the book have been reviewed by, at least, two referees, and care has been taken to ensure that the reviewer comments have been incorporated in the final version of the manuscript. We are thankful to the members of the scientific committee for their timely review of the scripts. All in all, there are three keynote papers from experts in soil science, climatology and ecology and 43 contributed papers providing a good indication of the status of geostatistics as applied in the environmental field all over the world. We feel now confident that the geoENV conference series, seeded around a coffee table almost six years ago, will march firmly into the next century. <...>

Many geostatistical variables have sample distributions that are highly positively skewed. Because of this, significant deskewing of the histogram and reduction of variance occurs when going from sample to block support, where blocks are of larger volume than samples. When making estimates in both mining and non-mining applications we often wish to map the spatial distribution on the basis of block support rather than sample support.

Gale is pleased to present the third edition of Geo-Data: The World Geographical Encyclopedia. This is the first new edition of Geo-Data since 1989, and it represents a complete revision and updating of that work. The purpose of the book remains unchanged: to provide the reader with the most detailed and comprehensive descriptions available for the physical geography of countries. Geo-Data’s focus and design is unique.

From its inception as a separate discipline, geostatis tics sought recognition from practitioners, not from math ematicians or physicists. and rightfully so. Indeed, the theory was essentially established by the 1950's by Kol mogorov and Wiener and exposed by Matern (1960), Whit tle (1963), and Matheron (1965), among others. But there is a long, hard way between a concept expressed by matrix notations in a Hilbert space and its implementation and routine application. It is my opinion that the main con tribution of geostatistics has been and still is implementa. tion, an essential follow-up step much too often forsaken by theoreticians. <...>

This introductory chapter presents a discrete approach specially designed for modeling the geometry and the properties of natural objects such as those encountered in biology and geology.

This user guide describes the recommended method for using the dynamic anisotropy options in Studio 3. It includes examples and shows the advantages of using the method. <...>

The data set used in the Creating Isoshells tutorial contains drillholes that are constrained by upper and lower wireframes. The wireframes are created by running a macro, and are used to define the extents of the isoshells that you create. <...>

This tutorial introduces you to the key Studio 3 features used for grade estimation. Typically 'grades' are estimated into the cells of a geological block model in order to generate a resource block model, which would then be used as input into the ore reserve optimisation or generation process of a mine planning cycle. Alternatively, 'grades' can estimated using panel (mining block) outlines and results saved to a results table, without creating a block model. <...>

Studio 3 provides many tools for designing pits, dumps and other types of surface excavations. This introduction will identify some of these tools and suggest an approach to pit design.