Morphological Characterization of Barley Genotypes under Upland Rainfed Conditions

Abstract

The objective of this research was to assess the morphological characteristics of twenty five barley genotypes which were planted under field condition and their morphological traits were recorded. Analysis of variance indicated a significant difference for all of the measured traits in 25 barley genotypes which could be a result of the large variation among barley genotypes. The estimates of the coefficient of variation (CV) were high for spike length (66.2%), second internode length (38.5%), first internode length (25.4%) and seed yield (22.9%). The other remaining traits indicated moderate to low CV estimates, i.e. from 16.9% in straw weight of spike to 2.8% in harvest index of spike. The thousand seed weight ranged from 20.49 to 41.44 g and genotypes G10, G22, G23 and G24 exhibited high values. The seed yield varied from 751.1 (G3) to 170.9 (G17) kg ha−1. The first internode weight, harvest index and thousand seed weight appeared to contribute on the barley seed yield. Also, the short plants with low values of plant height and regarding high values of the number of spikelet per spike and harvest index of spike could be useful as selection index for obtaining high seed yield in barley.