Abstract
Stationarity or statistical homogeneity is an important pre-requisite for subsequent statistical analysis on a given section of a soil profile to be valid. The estimation of important soil statistics such as the variance is likely to be biased if the profile is not properly demarcated into stationary sections. Existing classical statistical tests are inadequate even for simple verification of stationarity in the variance because the spatial variations of soil properties are generally correlated with each other. In this paper, a modified Bartlett statistical test is proposed to provide a more rational basis for rejecting the null hypothesis of stationarity in the correlated case. The accompanying rejection criteria are determined from simulated correlated sample functions and summarized into a convenient form for practical use.