Morpho-physiological Studies For Drought Adaptation In Wheat

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the most important cereal crop for global food supply. Most of the wheat crop in developing countries including Nepal is either grown rainfed condition or under limited irrigation condition, thus water stress hits the wheat crop at different growth stages which thus limiting the grain yield. An experiment with 60 different genotypes of wheat was carried out in Nepal for the characterization for drought adaptation.The ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) revealed significant variation between environments and among the wheat germplasms for most of the drought adaptive traits. A wide range of variability was observed for the selected drougt adaptive morpho-physiological traits in moisture stressed and non stressed environments. WUE was highly significantly correlated with biomass production. Nepalese cultivar Gautam showed a number of favorable drought adaptive traits. A number of landraces and advanced breeding lines showed high level of water use efficiency and other positive traits for drought adaptation.