Abstract
Thirty six barley landraces were collected from three districts of the southern highlands of Ethiopia and evaluated for 11 morphological traits to assess the extent of qualitative trait variations based on morphological traits. The results showed that 42% of the 36 barley landraces were found to have six kernel row numbers for the three collection districts. The distribution of four kernel raw number was found to be very low among the different landraces. Phenotypic diversity index (H') was analyzed and the result indicated that all characters revealed intermediate to high diversity ranging from 0.78 for kernel row number to 0.34 for glume color in all districts. Individual characters showed different levels of diversity index in different districts. The results clearly showed that there is high diversity of barley landraces in the southern highlands; this can be used for the conservation of these germplasm resources and future improvement work on barley crops. Key words: Diversity index, conservation, barley landraces, agro morphology.
Highlights
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is one of the earliest cultivated cereal crops in Ethiopia and it is the fifth most important cereal crop both in area coverage and production, with around 1,013,623.72 ha and18,155,830.29 qt, respectively (CSA, 2012)
A total of 36 barley landraces were collected from southern highlands of Ethiopia
Shannon-Weaver diversity index (H’) (Poole, 1974) was computed using the phenotypic frequencies to assess the phenotypic diversity of each character for all landraces: Where, s represents the number of phenotypic classes of a given character, and Pi the proportion of the total number of accessions consisting of the ith class
Summary
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is one of the earliest cultivated cereal crops in Ethiopia and it is the fifth most important cereal crop both in area coverage and production, with around 1,013,623.72 ha and. Malting and brewing quality (Lance and Nilan, 1980) For these important aspects, characterization of genetic variability of a population is required; because genetic variation within a population, and between populations, determines the rate of adaptive evolution and response to traditional crop improvement (Hunter, 1996). Previous studies on morphological variability of Ethiopian barley landraces concentrated on random samples and failed to assess variability of landraces within specific localities in terms of economically important traits that pave the way for further evaluation and utilization (Lakew and Alemayehu, 2011). This study was conducted with the objective to assess the extent of qualitative trait variations based on morphological traits of barley landraces from the southern highlands of Ethiopia, and select potential genotypes for variety improvement program
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