Abstract: Acomprehensive study on soil sampling error was conducted based on39 sampling plots of 8 different land use types with 25 soil physical and chemical parameters. The accumulative sampling error of different land use types was in order of pond sludge>plot margin>home garden>wood land>commercial vegetable plot>upland field>paddy field>beach plot.Among all test parameters, Cl^- was of the biggest smpling error, with a mean error of more than70%. The next one was available P, with a sampling error over 30%. The sampling errors for available Kand total Swere also above 20%. The parameters with the smallest sampling error were related with soil parent materials, which included various heavy metal elements, total P, total K, total Mg, pHand sand, and their sampling errors were less than10%. There were 11 parameters with 10～20% of sampling errors, such as water content of two granule soils, CaCO3, silt, clay, organic C, total N, total Na, total Ca, total B, and total As. The test parameters could be classified into 3 types by cluster analysis, which objectively reflected the impact of human's activities on the distributtion consistency of soil physical and chemical characteristics.

Key words: Agricultural environment, Soil analysis, Sampling error