Phenotypic diversity of the cereal landraces of South Tyrol

Abstract

The programme of the Laimburg Research Centre aiming at collecting the landraces still occurring in South Tyrol has led to the constitution of a relatively rich collection of the most important cereal species of the Alps. Detecting duplicates and quantifying the similarity of different accessions is an important issue, in order to evaluate the diversity of the gene bank collection. In the course of the Interreg III A GENE-SAVE project, 89 landraces of wheat, rye, barley and oat, collected between 1993 and 2008, were phenotypically described. The evaluation of the phenotypic diversity by methods of the descriptive statistics revealed that descriptions made in different years and/or at different sites are not comparable. For this reason, the phenotypic characterisation of the whole collection of a species should be carried out at one site in a single year. If the results of single description field trials are considered, a relatively high diversity within each crop collection with just few cases of possible duplicates was found. Only in one case it was possible to explain the duplicate occurrence on the basis of the passport data. Thanks to their diversity, the landraces represent an important gene reservoir for the future. The phenotypic characterisation can complement the information gained through genetic analyses or represent a technology-poor alternative to it.