The scarcity of water in Egypt need for hard work to solve it. One of the
best solutions is good management of limited water, therefore, this paper
aims to provide farmers and decision-makers with a new accurate and
cheap technique for water management. The experimental work was
carried out in the farm of Faculty of Agriculture, Benha University (300 21/
26.24// N and 310 13/ 15.89// E) during the summer seasons of 2016 and
2017. Three irrigation management tools (Expert system (ES), IRRIMET
model (IM) and Cropwat model (CW)) were applied with surface and subsurface drip irrigation systems. The results showed that the highest values
of water saving were achieved by IM model followed by ES tool. Also, the
estimated values of reference evapotranspiration (ETo), single crop factor
(Kc) and crop evapotranspiration (ETC) under ES were very close to that
obtained under IM model while under CW model the corresponding values
were far from that under IM model especially the ETc values. Yield were
achieved under subsurface drip irrigation system (SSDI). On the other
hand, the IM model gave the highest values of pepper yield, water
productivity (WP) and nutrient use efficiency (NUE) (6.86 ton h-1, 1.59 kg
m-3 and 21.17 kg kg-1, respectively, with SSDI and 6.71 ton h-1 , 1.64 kg m-
3 and 20.75 kg kg-1, respectively, with SDI), followed by ES (6.02 ton h-1 ,
1.3 kg m-3 and 17.28 kg kg-1, respectively with SSDI and 4.31 ton h-1 , 1.09
kg m-3 and 13.76 kg kg-1, respectively with SDI. However, the differences
between the values resulted from using ES and IM were not significant. The
lowest values of pepper yield, WP and NUE were achieved with the
management based on CW model outputs. |
