Canopy Characters and Light-Use Efficiency of Some Modern Wheat Varieties in Bangladesh

Aim: An experiment was conducted to analyze the canopy characters and light-use efficiency along with yield of five modern wheat varieties viz. BARI wheat-23, BARI wheat-24, BARI wheat-25, BARI wheat-26, and BARI wheat-27.

Study Design: The experiment was laid-out following a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with 3 replicates.

Place and Duration of Study: The experiment was conducted at the Crop Botany Field Laboratory, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh during the period extended from December 2013 to April 2014.

Methodology: Measurements included phenophase development, plant height, tiller production, leaf area development, light interception, dry matter accumulation, yield components, yield and harvest index.

Results: The wheat varieties exhibit significant difference in phenological development, plant height, tiller production, leaf area index, dry matter accumulation, light interception and use, yield and yield components like spike number/plant, spike length, grain number and weight per spike and thousand grain weight. The BARI wheat-24 and BARI wheat-25 varieties matured earlier than BARI wheat-27 or BARI wheat-26 by about a week while the remaining one matured in between. The BARI wheat-23 and BARI wheat-25 showed better performance and the BARI wheat-27 showed poor performance in all affairs of growth studied while the remaining others ranked intermediate.

Conclusion: Higher light-use efficiency leads to greater accumulation of dry matter and higher grain yield is directly linked to their greater partitioning of biomass into the grains i.e. higher harvest index.