A comparative analysis between sampling patterns for airborne PM10 mapping in the extractive sector

Designing a sampling strategy for any environmental variable with the aim of defining a contour map from field surveys entails making decisions about sampling pattern and number of samples. This paper is aimed to assess the influence of sampling strategies on the spatial estimation of PM10 concentration in a quarry environment. An intensive field survey consisting in more than two hundred samples was planned to fully investigate the spatial variability of the selected area. Then systematic, random and stratified random sampling schemes were compared by means of several iterative subsamplings of the well known data set deriving from monitoring campaigns. Different grid resolutions were selected and their correspondent variograms plotted. The corresponding structural analysis, when compared with output from raw data, allowed to point out the best sampling approach for this phenomenon