Soil Uncertainty Research

During a research placement at Heriot-Watt University in summer 2024, I worked on a project looking at spatial variation and uncertainty in soil properties at sites near Edinburgh. I collected soil samples in the field and processed them in the lab, measuring properties including soil moisture, composition and how easily water moves through the soil. I then analysed the spatial patterns in R using variograms, kriging and Gaussian Process methods, including approaches that explicitly incorporated measurement uncertainty. The wider aim was to understand how uncertainty and spatial variation in soil properties might ultimately propagate into flood modelling, since those models can be sensitive to assumptions about the ground beneath them. It was a nice combination of hands-on fieldwork, laboratory work and spatial statistics.