With the objective of assisting sampling systems and planning orange experiments, soil variability was assessed in a twelve-year-old orange orchard, cv. Pera, grown on a dystrophic Yellow Latosol of medium texture plain relief, in Governador Mangabeira, State of Bahia, Brazil, 1990. A transect consisting of 50 trees, spaced 4 m apart, was sampled. Soil samples were taken from a fixed point under the tree drip line on the successively fertilized strip. Results showed that only phosphorus and gravimetric soil moisture followed normal distribution, while the other soil properties followed log-normal distribution. The highest coefficients of variation were found for potassium and phosphorus, and the lowest for base saturation, pH in CaCl2, pH in water, and total sand. Excepting for base saturation and aluminium, which showed random distribution, the other soil properties exhibited spatial dependence ranging from 18 m (total sand and clay) to 59 m (organic matter, calcium, magnesium, Ca + Mg, and total exchangeable base).
frequency distribution; coefficient of variation; geostatistics; semivariogram; spatial dependence; soil sampling