ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECOLOGICAL STATISTICS, cilt.20, sa.1, ss.19-35, 2013 (SCI-Expanded)
One of the most important considerations in many environmental studies is need to allow for correlations among the variables. Monitoring and analyzing relationships between chemical environmental parameters using spatial correlation based regression modelling is the main motivation of this applied study. For this purpose, some noticeable environmental parameters of data sets obtained from two lakes have been considered and the concentrations of chemical variables such as cadmium and nitrate have been appraised by a regression-based geostatistical methodology. The modelling procedure consists of two stages. In the first stage, spatial variables are analyzed via multi-linear regression and some relationships are provided. Next, by using the spatial auto-correlations of the residuals, a type of regression-based kriging procedure is applied. The capacity of the model for appraising the water chemical variables is also tested and performance comparisons with ordinary kriging are conducted. Finally, the applications showed that analyzing water chemical variables with spatially correlated errors is a convenient and applicable approach for assessing the environmental systems.