Abstract
Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora Pierre ex Froehner var. robusta) germplasm comprising of 73 collections established in the gene bank of Regional Coffee Research Station, Chundale, Wayanad, India were evaluated with respect to 15 characters including seven growth parameters and eight yield contributing characters, for three successive seasons. The data were subjected to ANOVA to assess the significance of variations between accessions. All the seven growth parameters and eight yield contributing characters showed significant variations between the accessions. Among the growth characters, the highest coefficient of variation was observed for girth of primary branches followed by number of secondaries per primary while the lowest coefficient of variation was observed in the case of stem girth. With respect to yield contributing characters, the highest coefficient of variation was recorded for number of fruits per node followed by fruit volume. There was a wide variation for yield both within the accession and also among different accessions evaluated. Out turn (ripe to clean coffee) ranged from 18.84% to 26.06%. Study of overall performance of genetically diverse accessions of a crop plant is the first step in selection of superior genotypes for further exploitation in breeding programmes. Based on performance index derived from growth as well as yield contributing characters, all of which were quantitative in nature, the genotypes were ranked from 1 to 71 in the order of performance. The five superior accessions selected based on overall performance were S.3399, Wt.4, S.3657, Wt.2, and Wt.6 in the order. Interestingly, the best performer was the exotic introduction from Costa Rica followed by collections from Wariat Estate of Wayanad region of India and collections from Ivory Coast. Elite plants were marked from among these five accessions for cross compatibility studies in order to establish clonal as well as seedling orchards.
Keywords
Coffea canephora, Robusta Coffee, Variability, Performance, Germplasm