Abstract
Climate change is attributed to the changes of soil temperature and water availability in the planting environment. To study the effect of changing temperature and moisture condition on pre-emergent growth of potato seed tubers having different physiological age, a range of different temperature and moisture conditions were applied. Three temperatures (10, 15 and 20 °C) and three water potentials [wet (-0.02 MPa), dry (-0.6 MPa) and fluctuated between wet and dry] were set to two lots of cv Russet Burbank and Atlantic seed tubers that had been treated with storage temperature of 15 °C before planting to established aging. All possible combinations of seed tuber physiological age, cultivar and moisture treatments were randomized in each temperature level with 25 replications of each. Significant interactions (p<0.05) were found between cultivar, temperature, soil moisture in affecting the duration of the lag phase. A decrease in water potential at 10 °C from -0.02 MPa to -0.6 MPa extended the lag phase for cv Atlantic from 20 days to 23 days. Increasing the water potential from -0.6 to -0.02 MPa shortened the lag phase of younger tuber of cv Atlantic but lengthened the lag phase duration for older tuber. A weak interactions were found between cultivar, temperature and moisture (p<0.05) on the rate of linear elongation. In the case of Russet Burbank, linear elongation rate decreased with increasing water potential at 20 °C only. In contrast, for Atlantic, elongation rate increased from 2 mm/day to 4.5 mm/day with increase in water potential from -0.6 MPa to -0.02 MPa at 20 °C.
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