Moderating the effects of potassium sulfate on physiological traits in two barely varieties under irrigation with natural salty water

The decrease in drinking water usage for agriculture has led to a global problem during recent decade. It is very important to find new and replaceable water resources for agricultural usage because of the increasing need of urban population to high-quality water and decrease of drinking water supplies. To investigate the effect of different levels of salinity and potassium sulfate and interactions of them with physiological traits of two barley,an experiment was conducted using a factorial arrangement in a completely randomized block design with four replications in 2012 at soil science greenhouse of Sari University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. The variety of barley included: Productive and Sahra which were treated with different levels of water salinity (control) including distilled water (as control), proportions of 1/4 , 2/4 , 3/4 of sea water with well water and sea water (pure) and Potassium treatment included 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5 g per kg of soil. In this experiment, leaf area index (LAI), number of leaf, Chlorophyll, relative water content (RWC) and proline were measured. The results showed that salinity had negatively influenced all these plant features except for proline. The highest decrease of salinity with 23/84% was observed in leaf area index (LAI). The application of potassium also led to the improvement of Traits and decreased proline. Leaf area index (LAI) and relative water content (RWC) showed highest effect in increasing potassium with 22/49% and 14/03%, respectively.