Title: Potentiality of irrigation technologies to control soil salinity and greenhouses pepper yield production improvement in sandy soil of Southern Tunisia

Authors: Ines Gasmi; Basem Aljoumani; Mohamed Mechergui; Saeid Eslamian; Mohamed Moussa

Addresses: Department of Eremology and Combating Desertification, Institute of Arid Regions, Medenine, Tunisia; Department of Agricultural Engineering Waters and Forests, National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia, Tunis, Tunisia ' Department of Ecology, Ecohydrology and Landscape Evaluation, Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst-Reuter Platz 1, 10587 Berlin, Germany ' Department of Agricultural Engineering Waters and Forests, National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia, Tunis, Tunisia ' Department of Water Engineering, College of Agriculture, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan 8415683111, Iran ' Department of Eremology and Combating Desertification, Institute of Arid Regions, Medenine, Tunisia

Abstract: Localised surface drip irrigation (DI) is used to irrigate pepper crop in a greenhouse with two irrigation treatments 100% (T1) and 50% (T2) of the plant needs. The DI system is compared with a new irrigation technique called buried diffuser (BD). Irrigation treatment, soil depth, soil electrical conductivity (EC) and pepper yield production were used to compare between the irrigation systems using generalised additive mixed model (GAMM). The results indicated that yield production increased from 23,047 kg/ha under DI to 23,945 kg/ha under BD using T1 treatment. By using T2 treatment, the yield production was 13,164 kg/ha under DI and 15,703 kg/ha under BD. Moreover, BD helped to eliminate the salinity in the root zone for the T1 treatment. While it has the same effect on soil salinity as the T2 treatment of the DI. Under T1 and T2, the yield obtained from BD was significantly higher that DI.

Keywords: drip irrigation; DI; buried diffuser; BD; soil electrical conductivity; yield production; generalised additive mixed models; GAMMs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHST.2020.107233

International Journal of Hydrology Science and Technology, 2020 Vol.10 No.3, pp.287 - 301

Received: 16 Oct 2018
Accepted: 26 Dec 2018
Published online: 11 May 2020 *

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