Document Type : Research Article
Authors
Department of Agronomy and Plant Breeding, Faculty of Agriculture, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran
10.22067/jpp.2024.89385.1202
Abstract
Introduction
As the third crop among beans in the world and the first crop in West Asia and North Africa, chickpea is an important grain crop. Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) seeds are a rich source of protein (15 to 25 percent) and essential amino acids such as lysine that has high nutritional value. Among the important problems of chickpea cultivation, we can mention the water-deficit stress and weeds especially at the high densities. Water deficit-stress has a negative effect on crops during their life cycle and causes losses and decrease in their yield. Weeds are considered as competitors of agricultural plants and cause their yield loss, so if they are not controlled, the yield of crops will decrease between 10 to 100% depending on the competitive ability of the weed species. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the the response of chickpea to these stresses and determine the threshold of economic yield loss caused by them in chickpea.
Materials and Methods
Considering the limitation of water resources and the problems caused by weed competition, the morphological characteristics, yield and its components were investigated in chickpea under condition of water shortage and wild mustard (Sinapis arvensis L.) competition. Experiment was conducted as a split plot based on randomized complete block design with three replications at research farm, Ministry of Agriculture Jihad, Kalibar-Iran in 2021. Factors were irrigation regimes (irrigation at the 55%, 35% and 10% of total available soil water content) as the main plot and wild mustard density (0, 5, 10, and 15 plants m-2) as the subplot. At the end of the growing season, when the chickpea pods fully ripened and turned yellow, the morphological traits, yield and its components were measured in the cultivated chickpea plants. All data were subjected to an analysis of variance using the PROC GLM by slicing interactions in Minitab ver. 17.0 and SAS ver. 9.2.0 statistical softwares. The assumption of the variance analysis was tested by ensuring that the residuals were random, homogeneous, and with a normal distribution about a mean of zero using residual plots and the Anderson-Darling test. The LSD test was used at a probability level of 0.05 to compare main effects or interactions (after slicing).
Results and Discussion
The results showed that water-deficit stress reduces the morphological traits, yield and its components of cultivated chickpea due to its effect on various processes including photosynthesis, and high densities of wild mustard due to intense competition with chickpea plants in receiving water and nutrients, and further by shading on chickpea plants. Ineraction effects revealed that the main root length, number of secondary roots, dry weight of roots, height, number of secondary stems, number of pods per plant, number of seeds per plant, 100-seed weight, biological yield, seed yield and harvest index in chickpea are greatly reduced under the severe water-deficit stress condition and high weed densities. Morphological traits in field chickpea were less affected by increasing the wild mustard density under water-deficit stress conditions compared to yield and its components. As mentioned, the yield of cultivated chickpea decreased under water stress conditions and wild mustard competition, especially at high densities. The greatest reduction was observed after depleting 90% of the available water capacity in the soil at the 15 wild mustard plants per m2 (202 kg.ha-1), so that in this treatment seed yield was reduced by 91.39% compared to the control treatment under field capacity condition. The main reason for this can be the reduction of photosynthetic efficiency in the conditions of water-deficit stress and high weed density during the growing season, especially during flowering and seed formation, along with the effective competition of weeds to obtain environmental resources such as light, water, nutrients and even CO2. These factors have caused a decrease in the 100-seed weight and finally a decrease in the seed yield in cultivated chickpea significantly.
Conclusions
Therefore, it is necessary to prevent the occurrence of severe water-deficit stress conditions in the soil and the presence of wild mustard especially at the high densities in sensitive phenological growth stages in order to prevent a noticeable yield loss. In addition, control approaches should be taken against this weed species from its low densities, which is more important in the water-deficit stress conditions in the soil.
Keywords
Main Subjects
Send comment about this article