Abstract:The fine-scale (1 hm2) spatial heterogeneity of the soil physical properties in a primary tropical montane rainforest of Jianfengling, Hainan Island was investigated with geostatistics. The results demonstrated that:(1)the exponential, Gaussian and spherical models separately well fitted the soil data at different layers. The ranges of all the soil physical properties and the ratios of nugget versus sill at the different layers ranged from 10.810 to 48.650 m and 10.2%-87.8%, respectively. The soil porosity and water retention had a large nugget effect in a smaller scale (<10 m), indicating a strong spatial autocorrelation;(2)Both the ordinary Krige analysis and contour maps showed that there were several remarkable patches of all soil physical properties in the sample area. The spatial patterns of all the soil physical property at different sample depths were concordance with each other to a certain extent;(3)It was identified that the topography was a principal factor resulting the spatial patterns of all the soil physical properties of interests. In summary, it is concluded that all the soil physical properties were strongly spatial autocorrelated in the 1 hm2 primary tropical montane rainforest of Jianfengling, Hainan Island.