Abstract

This research aims to estimate correlations between agronomic traits and yield in Pome bananas, contributing to the elaboration of models for estimation of harvest. Agronomic traits were evaluated in 98 plants of ‘Dwarf Prata’ and 96 ‘BRS Platina’, considered replicates and sampled at random.  Correlations between the masses of the bunch, and hands and plant height; pseudostem perimeter at ground level, at 30 cm and at 100 cm in height; number of green leaves; mass of the bunch; number of hands and fruits per bunch; mass of the hands; mass, length and diameter of the stem, and mass of the fruit of the external row from the first to the tenth hand were estimated. The highest correlation coefficient between yield and vegetative traits for ‘Dwarf Prata’ and ‘BRS Platina’, was obtained for pseudostem perimeter at ground level, indicating its greater potential to compose harvest estimation models. The correlations between the masses of the bunch and hands with yield traits, for both genotypes, showed a higher potential for predicting the number of hands and fruits. Appropriate correlation estimates are associated with the fourth and fifth bunch, for the ‘Dwarf Prata’ and ‘BRS Platina’, respectively, using the mass of the fruit of the external row.

Key words: Banana, phenotypical descriptors, statistics, associations, genotypes.