Preparation of Distribution and Severity Map for Drying Blossom of Date Palm in Bam Region by Geographic Information System

In recent years, the drying blossom of date palm caused extensive damage to a considerable part of date palm orchards of Bam and Baravat, south of Iran. Drying blossom is responsible for a large amount of product loss and has been expanding in recent years. In this study, the technology of GIS was used as a quick and easy solution for monitoring of the drying blossom of date palm. It was carried out in three stages: collecting field information from damaged orchards,  feeding GIS with all collected data, and extracting  required information and the maps from the system which showed the severity and distribution of drying blossom in Bam and the suburb by three methods nearest neighbor, inverse distance weighted (IDW), and kriging. Results, upon data normalization, and the trend analysis showed that the severity of the damage in the southern coastal orchards was much higher than that in central and northern regions; the finding led us to focus on certain geographical coordinates (58 degrees and 20 minutes east longitude and 29 degrees and 4 minutes northern latitude to 58 degrees and and 26 minutes east longitude and 29 degrees and 2 minutes north latitude). It has been found  that the rate of drying blossom of date palm in 57.2% of the total damaged orchards were between 20-30%, and in 5.9% of the damaged gardens higher than 40%. Interpreting the results of the distribution of drying blossom on maps showed a relation between the severity of the disorder and the elevation of the area. It could be seen that the palm trees grown at altitudes above 1000 m suffered less damage; in other words, the higher the altitude, the less severity of drying blossom. The pictures received from Sentinel satellite showed that 56.2% or 2049 ha out of 3647 ha total area of palm orchards of Bam and Baravat was affected by drying blossom.