Soils are highly variable spatially due to the combined effects of physical, chemical, and biological processes that operate with different intensities and at different scales. Understanding the spatial variability of soil properties is essential in determining local fertilizer needs of tobacco. The spatial variability of soil nutrients in terrain with a typical gentle slope was comprehensively analyzed by a combination of geostatistics with a Geographic Information System (GIS) platform. Scatter diagrams of the spatial distributions of soil nutrients were then quantitatively constructed. The study potentially provides theoretical bases not only for the use of management zones (MZs) of tobacco fields in gentle mountain-terrain slopes, which are field subdivisions that have relatively homogeneous attributes of landscape and soil conditions, but also for decision-making with respect to precision fertilization. Soil samples (0-20cm) were taken at 88 points on an approximately 25-m grid using a global positioning system to define sample locations. The results showed moderate levels of spatial variability of four measures of nutrient contents in the research region. The contents of soil OM, TN, AN and AP values were low, and their means were 8.89 g/kg, 26.76 mg/kg, 1.92 mg/kg and 130.23 mg/kg, respectively. Organic matter (OM) with a nugget/still ratio 30.9%, and available K (AK) with a nugget/still ratio 31.1%, could be modeled with an exponential model. The nugget/still ratios of available N (AN) and available P (AP) were 37.7% and 26.4%, respectively, and they could be well modeled with a spherical model. As a result, all the nutrients exhibited a moderate spatial correlation. The range of soil OM, AN, AP and AK values were 61.8 m, 76.3 m, 70.5 m and 57 m, respectively. The fractal dimension (D) of AK was the highest, followed by OM and AN, and AP was the lowest. Anisotropic analyses and trend analyses all showed that OM and AP were even strongly anisotropic. AN and AK showed the widest scope in isotropism. The spatial distributions of the four measures of soil nutrients in the study region, which were influenced by elevation and slope and represented some regularity, were characterized by the mean contents of all nutrients being low in the north central area with a relatively steep slope, while being high in the comparatively flat northeast and south regions.