Physiological and Phenotypic Response of Wheat Cultivars with the Influence of Salt Water Irrigation

Abstract

An experiment was conducted at the second agricultural experiment station of the College of Agriculture - Al-Muthanna University, during the winter agricultural season (2021-2022) in order to study some physiological and phenotypic indicators of bread wheat varieties (Babil, Buhooth, Rasheed) with the effect of irrigation with salt water (2.5, 5, 10 ds m-1 ). The experiment was applied with RBCD design with three replications. The results of the statistical analysis showed that there were significant differences for the effect of salinity in most of the traits which recorded a noticeable decrease, such as plant height, tillers number, flag leaf area, spike length, and yield traits such as number of grains per spike and weight of 1000 grains, with regard to cultivars, the Babil variety excelled in height and weight of 1000 grains, Rasheed variety excelled in the length of the spike and the number of grains per spike, as for the anatomical traits, the density and length of the stoma decreased under saline stress, while the width of the stoma increased at the second and third saline levels.