Breeding resilience oats in Mediterranean environments through phenotyping and modelling approaches

Trabajo presentado en el II Spanish Symposium on Physiology and Breeding of Cereals (II SEFiMeC), celebrado en Córdoba (España) el 6 y 7 de marzo de 2019.-- Organized by excellence network AGL2016-81855-REDT.

Oat (Avena sativa L.) is an important cereal crop. During the last 20 years, the oat cultivated area in the Mediterranean rim has steadily increased by approximately 7500 ha per year. This almost equaled the oat cultivated area between Northern Europe and Mediterranean rim. However, the oat yield in Northern Europe remains much greater than that of the Mediterranean area (approximately 2.7-fold), because it is not particularly well adapted to hot and dry weather. As a consequence, there is a need for breeding oats for resilience to current Mediterranean and future climate conditions. Two of the bottlenecks in breeding are the availability of diverse genetic resources and appropriate selection tools. To speed breeding of resilient oats under Mediterranean conditions, we performed a field phenotyping of an oat collection consisting on 707 cultivars and landraces, under Mediterranean environments. Accessions were mapped in a virtual map, recording site and year of harvest, morphological and agronomical traits. Phenotyping was carried out in 3 different environments at two contrasting locations in Spain. To evaluate the influence of environmental factors on the agronomic traits, climatic and edaphic factors for each environment were recorded. A total of 18 climate variables (maximum temperature, minimum temperature and rain during pre-flowering, flowering and post-flowering period) obtain from the AEMET database and 16 edaphic variables were combined with agronomical data and subjected to redundancy analysis. This ordination technique determined the relative impact of the selected climatic variables on agronomic traits and genotype performances and through portioning of the effect highlighted the variable class with higher effect. The knowledge of the impact of the environmental variables in the different accessions will help to improve the oat crop for adaptation to current and future Mediterranean growing conditions.

This research was financially supported by the Project AGL2016-78965-R (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) and the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF).

Peer reviewed