VARIATION IN PHENOLOGY AND MORPHO-PHYSIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF WHEAT UNDER WELL WATERED AND WATER LIMITED CONDITIONS

Abstract

An experiment was conducted at the research field of Crop Physiology and Ecology Department of HSTU, Dinajpur during the period from November, 2007 to March, 2008 to examine the study of morpho-physiological characteristics of wheat under well watered and non-irrigated water limited conditions. Wheat varieties Prodip, Sufi, Bijoy and Pavon-76 were used as study materials and the experiments was laid out in a spilt plot design. The moisture retention capacity (MRC) and relative leaf water content (RLWC) of the well watered plants of all varieties were higher than the water stress plants. Varieties Prodip, Sufi and Bijoy showed higher MRC and RLWC compared to Pavon-76 at both the well watered and water limited conditions. From the phenological development, it was found that varieties Prodip, Sufi and Bijoy required higher number of days to attain different phenological stages compared to variety Pavon-76 with few exceptions in vegetative growth phase. In well watered condition all the varieties needed higher number of days to attain different phenological stages compared to non-irrigated water limited conditions except seedling emergence and crown root initiation stage. Important morphological characters like plant height, ear bearing tiller numbers, grain number per spike, seed size, grain yield and biological yields were significantly affected by the combine effect of growing conditions (water levels) and varieties. Varieties Prodip, Sufi and Bijoy showed better performance on those parameters than the variety Pavon-76 at both the growing condition. Under water stress condition all the varieties showed reduce value of the yield contributing characters compared to water condition. Varieties Prodip, Sufi and Bijoy had lower reduction of those parameters at non-irrigated water limited condition than those of variety Pavon-76. Finally, from the drought susceptibility index it might be concluded that varieties Prodip, Sufi and Bijoy were regarded as drought tolerant and variety Pavon-76 was considered as drought susceptible.