Best Paper in Pedometrics 2015

Best Paper in Pedometrics 2015

D G Rossiter, Chairman Pedometrics Awards Committee
e-mail: dgr2@cornell.edu

Only nineteen votes were received, despite extensive and repeated publicity, and five excellent papers to stimulate the voter’s interest. Unlike the 2014 award, this time there was a clear favourite, receiving 14 of the first place votes. The victory goes to:

Orton, T. G., Pringle, M. J., & Bishop, T. F. A. (2016). A one-step approach for modelling and mapping soil properties based on profile data sampled over varying depth intervals. Geoderma, 262, 174–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2015.08.013

Note that although the final publication was in January 2016 the paper was first on-line in 2015, so eligible.

The key innovation, as explained in the Abstract: “In this work, we present a statistical method that properly deals with the sample support of soil profile data so that all data can be considered in a single geostatistical analysis. The approach is based on the ‘area-to-point’ kriging framework, which can be used to represent the uncertainty from data that are averages over non-negligible sample supports (in our case, the different sampled depth intervals). We combine a covariance model for the increment-averaged data in the vertical domain with another model for the horizontal variation. This enables us to (i). process all data in a single analysis, and (ii). calculate predictions for any target depth and support based on the same statistical model.”

Thanks to all who nominated papers and who voted after having read these excellent papers. This award recognizes outstanding work in pedometrics and stimulates us to read these excellent papers. We’ll repeat the process for 2016, and this with the 2015 award will be presented at Pedometrics 2017.