Authors
1 Assistant lecturer of Shahid Khyabaniyan Higher Education Center, affiliated to Applied Science University, Zahedan
2 Former M.Sc. Student of Agronomy, Islamic Azad University of Birjand
Abstract
Drought stress is one of the most important problems of agriculture in arid and semiarid regions of the world. The application of substances such as superabsorbent polymers in soils may decrease fertilizers leaching and increase water retention in the soil which reduces crop water use in turn. This experiment was conducted with corn (Zea mays L.) in Dashtak, Zahedan during growing season 2012. The experiment was done as a split-plot with three irrigation regimes including irrigation to provide 60%, 80% and 100% corn water requirement (ETc) as main plots and four amounts of superabsorbent polymer (SAP) including 0, 30, 60 and 90 kg ha-1 as subplots in a completely randomized block design with three replications. The results showed that the effect of irrigation regimes, SAP levels and interaction between the two factors had significant effect on all studied traits. The regression models estimated for relative water content (RWC), chlorophyll index (CI), remobilization of photosynthetic matters (RPM), portion of remobilization to seed and seed yield indicted that applying SAP under 100% ETc had no effect on above traits, while all corn traits were improved under drought stress. The results also showed that applying 60 kg ha-1 SAP decreased corn water requirement as much as 20% and caused a seed yield and physiological characters equivalent to that of the 100% ETc.
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