This book conveys the theme of broad interaction of modern mineral exploration activities. It forms the foundation of successful exploration programmes in the sense that it advocates the scientific and objective use of all relevant geoscience information in exploration. Information Synthesis covers various technical aspects that are required for successful information synthesis, such as geographic information systems (GIS) for spatial database management, statistics for measuring variable relations, image processing for information enhancement, geostatistics for spatial data modelling, and favourability and neural networks modelling for mineral and petroleum mapping. Although the fields relevant to exploration are diverse, the book focuses on those that are fundamental and accessible to practictioners. Most quantitative techniques included here have proven records in practice or will be conceptually useful in the future. Simplicity is a principle for the authors in selecting and presenting the contents of this book, and real-case studies are presented where necessary to demonstrate the implementation of the methodologies.
