Evaluation of recurrent selection for drought tolerant tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea) using rain-out shelters

Abstract

Rain-out shelters provide an effective tool to establish controlled water-stress environments by excluding undesired rain events and have been widely used in the selection and breeding of cool-season turfgrass for improved drought tolerance. However, the efficiency of recurrent selection using rain-out shelters has seldomly been investigated. In this study, we documented the selection process of tall fescue in one cycle of recurrent selection, compared the drought tolerance of two consecutive generations and estimated selection gain of tall fescue using rain-out shelters. Depending on days of drought, relative selection gain ranges from −4.20% to 3.60%, indicating small and unstable improvement from the parental generation. A subsequent analysis of experimental data using Bayesian mixed linear model revealed low narrow-sense heritability estimations (0.18 for parental generation and 0.08 for progeny generation), providing an explanation for this observation.