Biological and agronomic characterization of bread wheat (Triticum aes-tivum L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) cultivated in the region of Constantine, Algeria

Abstract

The biological and agronomic characterization of cereals constitutes a pre-liminary and essential step for the assessment of genetic diversity state which must be valued, exploited and known in a clear and complete manner in order to be able to exploit them in improvement and adaptation programs of cereals. In this context, our study was carried out during the 2018/2019 agricultural campaign on the experimental site of the technical institute of field crops ITGC of El Khroub (Constantine, Algeria). Its objective was to char-acterize the biological and agronomic diversity in two cereal species, bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) by evaluating many pheno-morphological, physiological and biochemical characters as well as production traits (agronomic traits). The correlation coefficients analysis between traits indicates that the short and early heading varieties which accumulate less proline are more productive than varieties which are charac-terized by long straw and late heading in both species. However, it has been noted that barley varieties reach heading before bread wheat varieties. In addition, it shows that the grain yield is positively correlated with these com-ponents, in particular with the number of seeds per ear, the number of ears per square meter, and with the following parameters: the surface of the flag leaf and its content of chlorophyll pigments, the totality of the ear character-istics such as the length of the ear neck. These results lead us to say that an indirect selection via these crops can be beneficial for the production and improvement programs of cereals.