Efficient strategies to assess yield stability in winter wheat.

Area of Science:

• Agricultural Science
• Plant Breeding
• Genetics

Background:

• Climate change necessitates improving wheat yield stability for food security.
• Accurate assessment of yield stability requires extensive phenotyping across diverse environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an improved heritability estimate for assessing wheat yield stability.
• To compare yield performance and stability between wheat hybrids and inbred lines.
• To explore environment selection strategies for efficient yield stability evaluation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized phenotypic data from German winter wheat registration trials (up to 50 environments, 119-132 genotypes).
• Developed and implemented an improved heritability estimation method.
• Analyzed genotype-by-environment interactions to select contrasting environments.

Main Results:

• Reliable yield stability estimation requires phenotyping in at least 40 environments for heritability > 0.7.
• No significant differences in yield stability were found between wheat hybrids and inbred lines.
• Indirect selection via agronomic traits showed limited potential for improving yield stability.

Conclusions:

• Selecting contrasting environments reduces phenotyping intensity while maintaining high accuracy for yield stability assessment.
• The developed strategy offers potential for optimizing phenotyping efforts in wheat breeding programs.
• Further validation of environment selection in an a priori scenario is recommended.