Pollutant plume delineation from tree core sampling using standardized ranks

There are currently contradicting results in the literature about the way chloroethene (CE) concentrations from tree core sampling correlate with those from groundwater measurements. This paper addresses this issue by focusing on groundwater and tree core datasets in CE contaminated site, Czech Republic.

Preliminary analyses revealed strongly and positively skewed distributions for the tree core dataset, with an intra-tree variability accounting for more than 80% of the total variability, while the spatial analyses based on variograms indicated no obvious spatial pattern for CE concentration. Using rank transformation, it is shown how the results were improved by revealing the initially hidden spatial structure for both variables when they are handled separately.

However, bivariate analyses based on crosscovariance functions still failed to indicate a clear spatial correlation between groundwater and tree core measurements. Nonetheless, tree core sampling and analysis proved to be a quick and inexpensive semi-quantitative method and a useful tool.