effect of different irrigation methods on rice water productivity

in order to evaluate the possibility and compare different irrigation methods in ricecultivation, an experiment was conducted in factorial based randomized complete blockdesign at rice research institute of iran, mazandaran (amol), during 2011. treatments weredifferent irrigation regimes including alternate wet and drying (awd), semi-dry cultivation(sdc), combining shallow water depth with wetting and drying (swd) and traditionalirrigation (ti); and two different cultivars, namely, tarom and fajr, as local and improvedcultivars, respectively. results of anova indicated that different cultivars and irrigationmethods were significantly different in terms of irrigation and total water productivity. sdcwith 4042.5 m3ha-1 (nearly 54 percent water saving), irrigation water productivity of wpi=1.68 kg m-3, and total water productivity of wpi+r=1.38 kg m-3 showed better performance ascompared to the other irrigation regimes, especially compared to the traditional management(ti). in conclusion, regarding the better performance in water productivity, advancedirrigation methods (sdc, awd and swd, respectively) could be recommended for furtherinvestigations.