Software

In the late '70's the Centre de Geostatistique, Fountainebleau, began a master level program in geostatistics (two years) which attracted a steady stream of students from industry and goverment in various countries. In cooperation with Shell Oil and the Bureau de Recherche Geologie Mathematique (the French USGS), a commercial software package called BLUEPACK was developed. The early version was only ported to the VAX but the successor, ISATIS, is available on a number of workstation platforms. It is marketed in the US by GEOMATH of Houston. Geostatistics without the computer is of little interest, in many ways the developments in geostatistics parallel those in computing, particularly the appearance of PC's and workstations. 

Publications and Conferences

Two small volumes on geostatistics focused on mining appeared in English in the 70's, one by Jean-Michel Rendu and one by Isabel Clark. In the late '80's the volume by Isaaks and Srivastava appeared, subsequently a book by Noel Cressie (on the more general topic of spatial statistics but including geostatistics). 

In the summer of 1983 a second NATO ASI was held at Lake Tahoe, NV with a more international mix and including researchers from a wider set of applications. Thanks to a series of four papers by Richard Webster and some of his students (then at Rothamstead Research Center in England), geostatistics became known in the soil sciences. These appeared in the J. Soil Science (1980-1981). In 1979 in Prague, the International Association of Mathematical Geologists was founded and later began publishing the J. of the Int. Assn. Math. Geologists (later the name was officially changed to simply Mathematical Geology). While the journal was not limited to geostatistics it quickly became a principal place to publish such papers. A third international geostatistics congress was held in Avignon, France in 1988, a fourth in Troia, Portugal in 1992 and the most recent in Wollongong, Australia in 1996. Following the 1983 conference, Andre Journel and Leon Borgman (University of Wyoming) proposed an annual summer retreat in geostatistics aimed at researchers in North America. The first one was held near DuBois, Wyoming in August of 1984. The group was small and families were encouraged, the sessions were informal and no proceedings were produced but subsequently a newsletter was started which has appeared infrequently since then. A non-organization was founded in 1987 at a meeting in the Chirachaua Mtns southeast of Tucson, there were to be no dues, no membership list, no subscription price for the newsletter but volunteers would be solicited each year to organize meetings. Several have been held in Canada as well as the US and in 1996 a meeting was held in Guanajuato, MX. Following the establishment of the newsletter in North America another newsletter intended for the European community was established. 

Following the 1983 meeting several staff members at EPA-Las Vegas became interested in the application of geostatistics to environmental monitoring and assessment. In addition to research support for a number of individuals and programs, EPA commissioned a geostatistical software package, GEO-EAS, which was then released into the public domain. GEO-EAS was a DOS program but included a menuing system that made it fairly friendly and the price was right. Unfortunately for various reasons EPA has not continued to support the software and it has not been updated for a number of years. In 1992 Andre Journel and Clayton Deutsch published GSLIB which included a floppy disk. This was an extensive set of geostatistical programs (FORTRAN source code) and a users manual. Current versions of the code are available on the website at Stanford. Unfortunately the programs did not include any form of GUI and are intended to be run in batch mode. They are compilable on a variety of platforms however. In 1996 Yvan Pannatier published VARIOWIN together with a floppy disk. VARIOWIN is a MS-Windows version of two of the components of GEO-EAS. It allows for much larger data sets than in GEO-EAS and also interactive variogram modeling.