Abstract

Date palm usually grows in the arid and semi-arid areas. Shallow saline water tables and reducing fresh water are the major problems in these regions. Therefore, groundwater contribution to crop water use may be important. The objectives of this study were to finding out the model of groundwater contribution to supply water needs of palm seedling. To obtain this goal, the experiment was performed in three replicated split-split-plot designs inclusive of three levels of groundwater salinity (<4, 8 and 12 dS/m), groundwater depth (60 and 90 cm) and two levels of soil surface cover (mulching with cutted leaves of date palm and no mulch). The data were analyzed and investigated using software MSTATC (V.2), Excel 2007 and SPSS. 19. Results showed that the mulch effect on groundwater contribution was very significant (1%). The effect of groundwater salinity and depth on groundwater contribution was not significant at 5% level. The best regression by using three factors was multivariate linear regression with r2=0.6 and significant at 0.05. Also the results showed that the constant coefficient, mulch coefficient, depth coefficient and the salinity coefficient were correct with 99,. 99, 85 and 50% possibility, respectively.