Effect of Water Stress on Growth and Yield Performance of Wheat Genotypes

Climate change is one of the major threats to wheat cultivation globally. Among abiotic stress, imposed by climate change, drought stress causes a drastic effect on yield and productivity of wheat. Based on this context, research was carried out on eight genotypes including WS-I (Water stress), WS-II, WS-III, WS-IV, WS-V, WS-VI, WS-VII and Khirman (check variety) to check the effect of water stress at the experimental field of Nuclear Institute of Agriculture, Tandojam. The experiment was laid-out in a split-plot design (SPD) with factorial arrangement having four treatments i.e., T1 (normal six irrigations), T2 (one irrigation), T3 (two irrigations) and T4 (three irrigations) and three replications during Rabi season, 2019-2020 in order to assess the response of wheat genotypes under different water regimes conditions for vegetative, yield and yield-related traits. The results of analysis of variance results showed that genotypes were significantly different for all traits except spike length (cm). Similarly, a significant difference was observed among the treatments for all the traits except harvest index (%). While genotype x treatments interaction showed a significance level for most of the yield associated traits except few characters such as days to 75% heading, grain filling period, plant height (cm), peduncle length (cm), spikelets spike-1 and grains spike-1 indicating that genotypes perform similarly over the treatment. Maximum mean performance for all the traits was recorded under T3 treatment compared to the T2 and T1. Among the genotypes, WS-1V perform best for grains spike-1, grain weight spike-1 (g), 1000-grain weight (g), grain yield plot-1 and harvest index (%) under all treatments. However, WS-III also performed consistently under T2 and T3 treatment. Thus, genotypes like WS-III and WS-IV could be preferred for growing in those areas where growers face the problem of water shortage. Also, WS-III and WS-IV can be used as donor genotypes for developing drought tolerant varieties.