Identification of Favourable Testing Locations for Barley Breeding in South Pannonian Plain

Abstract

The aim of this study was to identify desirable, and also non-informative or highly correlated locations using GGE biplot. In this study, ten barley genotypes were tested across five locations for two growing seasons in official state trials performed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Water Management of the Republic of Serbia. In both growing seasons, environment had the highest influence on barley yield, explaining 77.70% in 2010/11 and 86.41% in 2011/12 growing season of the total variation. A significant grain yield variation explained by environmental effects indicated that the environments tested in our study were highly diverse. Together, PC1 and PC2 amounted 86.03% and 66.91% of the genotype and genotype × environment interaction sum of squares, in 2010/11 and 2011/12, respectively. The results indicate that Rimski sancevi was most favorable location and should be used for further multi-location trials while location Sremska Mitrovica was the least informative and it can be excluded from further trials. Excluding one of two similar environments could save resources with minimal risk to lose important information about genotypes performance. According to the results of our study, it can be concluded that GGE biplot is useful method for environment evaluation.