## 1 Introduction
[PERSON] and [PERSON] [8] inferred that, depending on the studied cultivars (i.e., Khlas, Ruzz, and Shishi), the marketing margins of dates are significantly affected by the marketing costs and methods; the technical problems related to the services of transportation, packaging, sorting, marketing, storage of dates; and the behavioral problems related to the knowledge of the marketing methods, good quality, and best pricing techniques. Few research studies have been conducted in the Al-Ahsa oasis attempting to explore the relationship between the number of date palm trees and the agricultural areas or to determine the density of the trees per cultivated areas. [PERSON] et al. [17] utilized a BASIC computer program to produce palm density maps and to assess areas growing date palms with dissimilar densities given as percentages of the total cultivated areas. The main finding of this work indicated that the total calculated area was underestimated as compared to the actual area due to using a large-scale map (1:100,000), estimating asymmetrically shaped submain areas, and the random scattering of cultivated areas within the submain areas. Moreover, a recent study conducted by [PERSON] et al. [6], using a randomly selected sample of 258 active farmers who were surveyed by explicitly designed questionnaires, revealed that the farm features (utilized agricultural area, ownership, and labor) were dissimilar from one region to another throughout the oasis. However, none of these studies used the geographic information system (GIS) technique to assess the correlation between the number of date palm trees and their cultivated areas and, hence, to estimate the spatial variations in their densities in the oasis. The GIS was successfully used in several studies to depict the topological spatial variations in land cover features [18; 19; 20; 21; 22], and in others to fuzzily model such land surface features [23; 24; 25; 26; 27]. Therefore, the current study aimed to analyze and map the spatial distribution of the most favorable grown date palm cultivars in the Al-Ahsa oasis, the KSA. The relationships between these cultivars to their corresponding cultivated patches within the farms were also highlighted and discussed. This was carried out to emphasize the current dominating nature of these date palm cultivars at the Al-Ahsa oasis, as a prominent date palm cultivated area in the KSA. The study is assumed to contribute to the applied date palm research fields through determining the tendency of farmers to exploit the farm's available area based on the preferences of either a particular date palm cultivar or a value of the available cultivated land being converted into non-agricultural purposes. Thus, the outcomes of this investigation can be generalized for other areas. It is also expected to highlight the behavioral disparity of date palm farmers in apportioning the palm trees' area, taking the study area's geographical subregions (northern, central, and eastern) as an example. This could present important economic indicators related to the farm area and the extent to which farmers need to utilize the trees' microenvironment in order to grow other plants. Finally, the study will also contribute to the research stream through emphasizing the importance of the spatial autocorrelation application as a tool to reveal the cultural affinity between each neighboring farmer to choose or cultivate either a specific cultivar or to combine various cultivars, which, in turn, criticizes or supports the superiority of a specific cultivar as the literature states. In addition, the application of the spatial autocorrelation technique used in this study vigorously characterizes the extent of the relationship between each two variables being able to change within an area. The technique also has the potential to assess the significance of spatial autocorrelation along with any potential spatial dependency between two variables.