5 Chemical analysis of contaminated soil for sound environmental site assessment. Part 1: the critical role of proper sampling

Proper sampling of particulate matter for instrumental analysis is a common task in many applied scientific, technology and engineering fields. It is a crucial task for ensuring that measurements made on a given set of samples are representative estimate of the parameters of interest in the original sampling target. Unfortunately, sampling particulate matter is in many fields performed without a scientific basis, mostly because its critical role is ignored, or at best, misunderstood, and because of an unawareness of, sometimes a disregard for, the Theory of Sampling. This two-part column illustrates this important point using experience in the field of geo-environmental engineering.