Özet:

Abstract Plant growth is adversely affected by salt deposition in the root zone and requires judicious irrigation water management for enhancing productivity in an irrigated saline environment. To study the salt deposition and subsequent leaching of salts below the root zone of wheat, an experiment with four wheat cultivars (viz. three salt-tolerant KRL-210 (V 1 ), KRL-1-4 (V 2 ), and one salt non-tolerant HD- 2894 (V 4 ) were taken for the experiment under artificially prepared irrigation water with salinity levels of 4 dS m -1 (S 2 ), 8 dS m -1 (S 3 ) and 12 dS m -1 (S 4 ) besides the varying salinity of the groundwater from 1.45 to 1.7 dS m -1 (S 1 ) during rabi seasons of 2009-10 and 2010-11 at the research farm of Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, India. The soil salinity (EC 1:2 ) was 0.2 dS m -1 before the conduction of the experiment during rabi 2009-10 and varied from 0.26 to 0.95 dS m -1 during rabi 2010-11. The total salt-induced in soil was 70.15 t ha -1 and 55.6 t ha -1 for rabi 2009-10 and 2010-11 respectively by saline irrigation water. The salt deposition in the crop root zone was observed at maximum (i.e., 17.04 and 22.97 t ha -1 during rabi 2009-10 and 2010-11, respectively) for S 4 treated plots and minimum in S 1 treatment levels. The production functions for wheat varieties were developed and the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) was 0.98 to 0.99 and 0.94 for salt-tolerant and salt non-tolerant varieties, respectively. Moreover, it was also estimated that the maximum salt was deposited on the top soil layer (15cm) and the leaching of salts from S 1 , S 2 , S 3, and S 4 treatments levels was 65%, 63%, 52%, and 48% salts, respectively from the root zone. However, this study would assist in the computation of leaching requirements for enhancing productivity in irrigated saline environments.

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