Preparation of soil and landscape requirements table for Date palm to use in land suitability evaluation

Iran is one of the major date-producing countries and not only has a long history in this field, but also it currently has the second grade of Date production in the world. Therefore, the cultivation and production of Dates in Iran is of particular importance both nationally and for the inhabitants of the producing provinces. In this regard, planning for optimal utilization of production resources such as soil and lands for development of the yield in the country has a special place. Consequently, evaluation of land suitability and utilization of lands in proportion to their potential and capacity for specific land use seems an important solution. However, one of the necessities of land suitability assessment is to determine the crop requirements of the plants such as the status of the soil as a production bed. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of soil characteristics on Date yield and their rating for use in land suitability evaluation studies.

First, 91 palm Date orchards were selected with diversity of soil and yield in Kerman, Fars, Khuzestan, Hormozgan and Bushehr provinces, in each garden, a soil profile was studied and a land use questionnaire completed. Physicochemical and fertility analyses were carried out on the collected soil samples. Multivariate regression was investigated between yield as dependent variable and independent variables including salinity, percentage of exchangeable sodium, pH, gypsum, calcium carbonate equivalent, clay, sand, silt, gravel, available potassium and phosphorus by stepwise method. Then, by checking the relations of simple regression between the important and effective characteristics with yield, related equations and diagrams were drawn and the rating of land characteristics set. The proposed crop requirement table was evaluated and validated using soil and yield data of 20 orchards.

Results showed that potassium, sand percentage, soil salinity, ESP and CaCO3 had the highest and soil organic carbon content and pH had the least variation. Maximum amount of lime and gypsum was 74 and 17% and soil texture varied from sandy to clay, respectively. Regression results showed that independent variables including soil salinity, ESP, CaCO3, gypsum, gravel, available potassium and phosphorus were effective on yield, respectively. The determination coefficient of multivariate regression indicated that the variables entered into the model can determine 79% of the variance related to the dependent variable. In simple regression equations, soil salinity, ESP, gypsum, CaCO3 and gravel had a decreasing effect and organic carbon, available phosphorus and potassium had increasing effect on yield. The highest contribution to the decline in Date yields was related to soil salinity, gravel, ESP and calcium carbonate.

The coefficient of determination between yield and soil index obtained from the proposed soil and landscape requirements table for the Date was about 0.79 which showed acceptable accuracy of the prepared table. Soil salinity, ESP, gypsum and calcium carbonate limit for Date palm were determined 8 dS/m, 12, 8 and 38 percent, respectively.