This volume contains the edited papers prepared by lecturers and
participants of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Statistical
Treatments for Estimation of Mineral and Energy Resources" held at II
Ciocco (Lucca), Italy, June 22 - July 4, 1986. During the past twenty
years, tremendous efforts have been made to acquire quantitative
geoscience information from ore deposits, geochemical, geophys ical and
remotely-sensed measurements. In October 1981, a two-day symposium on
"Quantitative Resource Evaluation" and a three-day workshop on
"Interactive Systems for Multivariate Analysis and Image Processing for
Resource Evaluation" were held in Ottawa, jointly sponsored by the
Geological Survey of Canada, the International Association for
Mathematical Geology, and the International Geological Correlation
Programme. Thirty scientists from different countries in Europe and
North America were invited to form a forum for the discussion of
quantitative methods for mineral and energy resource assessment. Since
then, not only a multitude of research projects directed toward
quantitative analysis in the Earth Sciences, but also recent advances in
hardware and software technology, such as high-resolution graphics,
data-base management systems and statistical packages on mini- and
micro-computers, made it possible to study large geoscience data sets.
In addition, methods of image analysis have been utilized to capture
data in digital form and to supply a variety of tools for charaterizing
natural phenomena.
