Abstract
This study was planned with the purpose of evaluating the drought tolerance of advanced breeding lines of chickpea in natural field conditions. Two methods were employed to impose field conditions; the first: simulating drought stress by growing chickpea genotypes at five rainfed areas, with Faisalabad as the non-stressed control environment; and the second: planting chickpea genotypes in spring to simulate a drought stress environment, with winter-sowing serving as the non-stressed environment. Additive main effects and multiplicative interaction (AMMI) and generalized linear models (GLM) models were both found to be equally effective in extracting main effects in the rainfed experiment. Results demonstrated that environment influenced seed yield, number of primary and secondary branches, number of pods, and number of seeds most predominantly; however, genotype was the main source of variation in 100 seed weight and plant height. The GGE biplot showed that Faisalabad, Kallur Kot, and Bhakkar were contributing the most in the GEI, respectively, while Bahawalpur, Bhawana, and Karor were relatively stable environments, respectively. Faisalabad was the most, and Bhakkar the least productive in terms of seed yield. The best genotypes to grow in non-stressed environments were CH39/08, CH40/09, and CH15/11, whereas CH28/07 and CH39/08 were found suitable for both conditions. CH55/09 displayed the best performance in stress conditions only. The AMMI stability and drought-tolerance indices enabled us to select genotypes with differential performance in both conditions. It is therefore concluded that the spring-sown experiment revealed a high-grade drought stress imposition on plants, and that the genotypes selected by both methods shared quite similar rankings, and also that manually computed drought-tolerance indices are also comparable for usage for better genotypic selections. This study could provide sufficient evidence for using the aforementioned as drought-tolerance evaluation methods, especially for countries and research organizations who have limited resources and funding for conducting multilocation trials, and performing sophisticated analyses on expensive software.
Highlights
Drought is accepted as a serious threat to crops worldwide, to the areas where there is less rain fall
Emergence, flowering, pod set, and physiological maturity are defined as the four developmental stages of relatively low level of positive correlation with plant height (PH), number of pods (NOP), number of seeds (NOS), 100 seed weight (SW), and Seed yield (SY)
Drought stress evaluation in winter- and spring-sown chickpea genotypes proved that a high-grade drought stress was imposed on plants sown in spring, which leads to differentiate clearly the level of stress by looking into the change in growth parameters
Summary
Drought is accepted as a serious threat to crops worldwide, to the areas where there is less rain fall. Grain yield is considered to be a determining factor of stress tolerance in crop plants as scarcity of water leads to reduced grain yield in cereal and legume crops This has been indicated in a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies where chickpea stands on the seventh position among 13 legume species when categorized on the basis of drought-induced yield reduction (Daryanto et al, 2015). Pakistan is the third largest producer of chickpea in the world (FAOSTAT, 2015), and among all provinces, Punjab contributes 80% of chickpea production in Pakistan (Government of Pakistan [GOP], 2016) It is mainly cultivated in marginal lands, rainfed areas, and in sand dunes of the Thal desert (Rafiq et al, 2018; Nisa et al, 2020)
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