Adaptation of Winter Wheat Cultivars to Different Environments: A Case Study in Poland

Marzena Iwańska,Michał Stępień,Paulo Rodrigues,Jakub Paderewski

doi:10.3390/agronomy10050632

Marzena Iwańska, Michał Stępień + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy10050632

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Abstract

A proper understanding of cultivar adaptation to different environments is of great relevance in agronomy and plant breeding. As wheat is the most important crop in Poland, with a total of about 22% of the total sown area, the study of its performance in environments with different productivity levels for consequent cultivar recommendation is of major importance. In this paper, we assess the relative performance of winter wheat cultivars in environments with different productivity and propose a method for cultivar recommendation, by considering the information of environmental conditions and drought stress. This is performed in the following steps: (1) calculation of expected wheat productivity, depending on environmental factors, (2) calculation of relative productivity of cultivars in the environments, and (3) recommendation of cultivars of a specific type and range of adaptation. Soil and weather conditions were confirmed as the most important factors affecting winter wheat yield. The weather factors should be considered rather in shorter (e.g., 10 day) than longer (e.g., 60 day) time periods and in relation to growth stages. The ANCOVA model with genotype and management intensity as fixed factors, and soil and weather parameters as covariates was proposed to assess the expected wheat productivity in particular environments and the expected performance of each genotype (cultivar). The recommendation of cultivars for locations of specified productivity was proposed based on the difference between the expected cultivar yield and the mean wheat productivity, and compared with the Polish official cultivar recommendation list.

Highlights

Wheat is one of the most important crops in the world and the third largest crop in terms of production after sugarcane and maize and before rice [1]
We studied the relative performance of winter wheat cultivars in environments with different productivity and proposed a method for cultivar recommendation that takes into consideration the information of environmental conditions and drought stress
This was performed in three steps: (1) calculation of expected wheat productivity, depending on environmental factors, (2) calculation of relative productivity of cultivars in the environments, and (3) recommendation of cultivars of a specific type and range of adaptation

Summary

Introduction

Wheat is one of the most important crops in the world and the third largest crop in terms of production after sugarcane and maize and before rice [1]. It is the most important crop in Poland, where it occupies about 22% of the sown area [2]. In Poland, winter wheat is grown in environments of variable productivity, at both regional [2] and local scale. Studies on a wide adaptation, even of the best varieties, show that it may not be sufficient in environments with soils of extremely variable productivity [4]

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