Abstract

Identification of durum wheat variety adapted to drought environment is required to expand durum wheat cultivation to lowland areas in order to meet the growing demand of the crop for industrialization. The objective of the study was to evaluate and identify durum wheat genotypes tolerant to terminal drought, using morpho-agronomic traits. One hundred and forty four durum wheat (Triticum turgidium var durum) genotypes were grown in lattice design replicated twice under non-drought and drought stressed conditions, induced at anthesis stage at Debre-Zeit experimental station in 2017 during dry season. Analysis of variance showed that significant differences for all the traits, except days to heading and anthesis and between normal and stress conditions and also among studied genotypes as well as interaction effects of moisture environment and genotypes. Drought significantly affected reduction of all traits, except number of days to heading and spikelet number. In average, drought reduced grain yield (48.3%), grain filling period (41.7%), grain yield per spike (29.6%) and 1000 grain weight (18.3%) and number of kernels per spike (16.3%). LRPL-31, MCD-1-21 and ICA# showed superior performance under drought environment whereas Ude, the cultivated variety found the best under non-drought condition. Six genotypes, namely, 55, 30, 31, 91 15 and 58 were found among the top 10% high yielding genotypes and showed superior performance in both stress and non-stress conditions.

Key words: Anthesis, drought tolerance, drought stress, grain yield, Triticum turgdium.