Abstract:
Faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is an important cool season food legume belongs to fabaceae family. Twelve faba bean genotypes were evaluated in 2018/2019 cropping season across seven environments in Ethiopia using randomized complete block design with four replications. The objectives were to determine magnitude of genotype, environment and genotype by environment interaction and yield stability, identifying stable faba bean genotypes across the target environments. The Combined analysis of variance across locations was done using mixed model and the result showed that grain yield was highly significant difference (p<0.01) among genotypes, environments and G x E interaction. Environment explained 88.4% of the treatment variation whereas; G and G x E accounted 1.1% and 2.7% respectively. The mean grain yield of environments ranged from 950.5 kg ha-1 at Adet to 4509.3 kg ha-1 at Holetta. The highest yield was obtained from standard check Tumsa (3171.8 kg ha-1) followed by G8 (EH 09017-5) and G6 (EH 010058-2) with mean grain yield 3125.3 kg ha-1 and 3081.4 kg ha-1, respectively whereas, the lowest yield was obtained from G7 (2653.3 kg ha-1). Eight stability parameters (ωi, ơ2, S2ԁi, bi, Pi, ASV, AMMI and GGE biplot) were employed to identify stable genotypes with high protein content and large seed size. The Pearson correlation showed highly significant positive rank correlation Pi (r = 0.978) between cultivar mean performance and mean grain yield and Shukula stability variance (ơ2) showed perfect (r=1) significant positive rank correlation with (ωi) hence, the two stability parameters were similar for ranking purposes. The application of AMMI and GGE biplot facilitate the visual comparison and identification of superior genotypes for supporting decision on variety selection and recommendation in different environments. AMMI model selected best genotypes that suit for a specific environment. Accordingly, G11, G8, G4 and G3 genotypes were selected as best for Assasa; G11, G3, G8 and G12 for Kulumsa; G12, G5 G1 and G8 for Bekoji; G12, G3, G8 and G5 for Adet and G12, G1, G4 and G5 for Debark. The stability parameters identified G8, G6 and G12 were stable and high yielder by most stability measures coupled with high protein content and large seed size. The polygon view of GGE biplot identified two mega environments E1 and E2 as one mega environment and G11 (EH 09046-3) was the vertex genotype. The second mega environment comprises E3, E4, E5, E6 and E7 and G12 (Tumsa) was the winning genotype. This indicated no single genotypes showed superior performance across all environments. Since the experiment was done only one year at seven environments, it has to be repeated in multi locations to provide more reliable results and make recommendations for wide or specific adaptable genotypes.
Keywords: AMMI, GGE Biplot, Environment, Rank correlation, Stability