Screening of Bread Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Genotypes for Waterlogged Area in Highlands of Ethiopia

Due to a serious waterlogging issue, Ethiopia's agricultural productivity has been severely limited, yielding much lower than expected results. In this study conducted on screening of 49 for first year and 60 for second year bread wheat genotypes selected from international nursery. An experiment was undertaken at two locations namely, Ginchi Agricultural Research Sub Center and Tulu Bolo farmer field in Ethiopia in 2018/19 and 2019/20 cropping seasons. The main objective of this study was to select best performed genotypes in waterlogged areas for next variety development and future breeding program. The experiment was conducted using apha lattice with three replications. Data on yield and associated traits were collected and analyzed using SAS version 9.3 software. The results revealed that the separate analysis of variance over the two years conducted at Ginchi showed statistically significant (P ≤ 0.01) differences among the genotypes for all phenotypic traits except Septoria disease severity, Number of tiller and biomass yield considered in this study. The results revealed that the separate analysis of variance over the two years conducted at Tulu bolo showed statistically non-significant (P <0.01) differences among the genotypes for all phenotypic traits except days to heading, plant height, Septoria disease severity agronomic score, hectoliter weight and thousand kernel weight considered in this study. In general from the two locations the maximum and minimum were revealed 29.85qt/ha and 2.32qt/ha respectively. This indicated that almost all genotypes were showed low performed and the wheat breeder give more attentions to provide resistance genotypes for waterlogging.