Characterization and Assessment of Genetic Diversity for Agro-Morphological Traits of Ethiopian Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) landraces

This experiment was conducted in 2016 at Sirinka and Jari, under rainfed conditions to characterize and assess genetic diversity among the Ethiopian chickpea landraces. Two hundred two new germplasm accessions were grown in an alpha lattice design with three replications. Data on 16 traits were collected and analysed. Differences among the accessions were significant  P<0.01). The genotypes were grouped into five clusters with different sizes. The genetic distances among the clusters were significant. The highest diversity indices pooled over characters within zones were recorded for accessions from South West Shewa (H= 2.03 ± 0.05) followed by Gurage (H=0.81 ± 0.08), West Shewa (H=0.73 ± 0.04) and North Gonder (H= 0.72 ± 0.05). The existence of wider morpho-agronomic diversity among the chickpea collections implies the potential to improve the crop and the need to conserve the diversity. Future collecting operations of chickpea accessions should strategically focus on areas with relatively large variation. From a genetic conservation point of view, it appears that South West Shewa, Gurage, West Shewa and North Gonder could be suitable as in situ conservation sites. Keywords: Accessions; diversity; clustering