Table 2. Correlation coefficients between various seed characteristics in an unselected and a selected jojoba population. Jojoba, Simmondsia chinensis (Link) Schneider, a perennial evergreen shrub native to the Sonoran Desert in North America, is being developed as an industrial crop for semi-arid environments. Most of the 16,000 ha of the existing jojoba plantations were established by seed harvested from wild jojoba populations (Naqvi et al., 1988a). Because jojoba is easily propagated vegetatively, one can control the ratio of male and female plants in the field and bring about a high degree of plant uniformity for farm mechanization. For a successful cloning program, genetically superior plants need to be continuously available. Yermanos and his associates made extensive investigations of jojoba seeds collected from wild populations in Arizona, Califorma, and Mexico (Clark and Yermanos, 1980; Yermanos and Duncan, 1976) and found significant variability in seed production, seed size and weight, and wax content per seed. They concluded that selection for large seed size and high oil content may be important for developing high-yielding jojoba cultivars. Selection and other agronomic studies are currently in progress at the Univ. of California, Riverside (Naqvi et al., 1988b). The objective of this investigation was to evaluate yield and seed characteristics of two jojoba populations that were derived from a base population raised from seed collected in nine different locations in California and