MORPHOMETRIC CHARACTERIZATION OF THE BREAD WHEAT VARIETY "ISKANDARIA" IN THE REGION OF AOUGROUT (ADRAR)

In Algeria, the diversity of wheat is poorly known for this reason an inventory has been made in a regionof southern Algeria "Adrar", specifically in the area of Aougrout, located south of the Timimoun region.Therefore, local varieties of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) have been tried for morphologicalcharacterization. In this context, only one traditional bread wheat variety was studied using ninequantitative agromorphological traits and eight qualitative traits. The phenotypic diversity wasdetermined by the Shannon-Weaver diversity index (H’) at different levels. The estimated H’s showeda wide phenotypic variability for the different traits with an average H’ of 0.68 for the quantitative traitsand 0.34 for the qualitative traits. The results of this work revealed the great phenotypic diversity of thebread wheat variety (Iskandaria) studied and show that this local variety (whose genetic compositionremains to be studied more precisely) is mainly grown by traditional farmers, who conserve this geneticresource often on very small plots in oases and inaccessible land.