Geostatistical and Quantitative Approaches for Resource Estimation (An Old and Rare Book)

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From the dawn of the human civilisation every time man has strived to command the nature and has made great achievements. According to the great philosopher Bacon, man cannot command the nature only to obey her. On the other hand, the illustrious Persian poet Rumi expressed that man can recreate a new world for himself. This introduces the dilemma of selecting a proper strategy to maintain the 'man-environment relationship. The alarming growth of human population and rapid industrialisation of human society cause a heavy demand on the existing resource base. This has generated problems of unbalanced distribution at the regional and national levels. To reduce this kind of problem time has come to find new areas with huge resource potentials to serve the country. Before undertaking any appraisal of the resource of any region it is necessary to have a precise and adequate inventory of the resources that can be economically harvested for the benefit of the inhabitants. It is essential to collect and synthesize primary and secondary data along with the experiences gathered from the field visits.

The availability of natural resources provides basic support to human existence. All production and consumption activities have been a process of utilising the natural resources which are not abundant. Physical resources exist as stock at a particular point of time, e.g. fossil fuels, minerals, land, water, etc. On the other hand, the resources with biological nature, e.g. forests, animal and human resources, etc. have their stocks changing at a natural rate. This introduces the temporal limitation of natural resources, whereas the uneven distribution leads to the areal limitation of natural resources. Like natural resources, the economic resources also experience similar situation. This limited supply of natural and economic resources needs optimum utilisation so that there is the maximum benefit with minimum misuse.

The complexity of man-resource interaction has, therefore, led to inter- disciplinary research in geography. The approaches to the study of this particular subject domain have been concentrated broadly on qualitative and quantitative estimation of resource base. The estimation or appraisal enabled planners as well as the researchers to comment on the overall socio-economic status of an areal unit and its adhering prospect in the future in respect of sustainability. Qualitative approach, whereas, is based on providing an idea about the quality of the resources, quantitative approach, on the other hand, is more statistical and grounds on correct approximation of the different modes of the availability of the resources. The role of geostatistics in quantitative estimation of resources at the spatio-temporal scale has been universally accepted as a strong key and widely used over decades. The extension and dimension of the usage and exploitability of the geostatistics in detection and appraisal of resources have become so widespread that at present its application may be seen as an indispensible tool in resource assessment.