Selecting High Forage-Yielding Alfalfa Populations in a Mediterranean Drought-Prone Environment Using High-Throughput Phenotyping
2025
Hamza Armghan Noushahi | Luis Inostroza | Viviana Barahona | Soledad Espinoza | Carlos Ovalle | Katherine Quitral | Gustavo A. Lobos | Fernando P. Guerra | Shawn C. Kefauver | Alejandro del Pozo
Alfalfa is a deep-rooted perennial forage crop with diverse drought-tolerant traits. This study evaluated 250 alfalfa half-sib populations over three growing seasons (2021&ndash:2023) under irrigated and rainfed conditions in the Mediterranean drought-prone region of Central Chile (Cauquenes), aiming to identify high-yielding, drought-tolerant populations using remote sensing. Specifically, we assessed RGB-derived indices and canopy temperature difference (CTD: Tc &minus: Ta) as proxies for forage yield (FY). The results showed considerable variation in FY across populations. Under rainfed conditions, winter FY ranged from 1.4 to 6.1 Mg ha&minus:1 and total FY from 3.7 to 14.7 Mg ha&minus:1. Under irrigation, winter FY reached up to 8.2 Mg ha&minus:1 and total FY up to 25.1 Mg ha&minus:1. The AlfaL4-5 (SARDI7), AlfaL57-7 (WL903), and AlfaL62-9 (Baldrich350) populations consistently produced the highest yields across regimes. RGB indices such as hue, saturation, b*, v*, GA, and GGA positively correlated with FY, while intensity, lightness, a*, and u* correlated negatively. CTD showed a significant negative correlation with FY across all seasons and water regimes. These findings highlight the potential of RGB imaging and CTD as effective, high-throughput field phenotyping tools for selecting drought-resilient alfalfa genotypes in Mediterranean environments.
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