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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Madison, Wisconsin » U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center » Dairy Forage Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #353856
Title: Resilience, stability, and productivity of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) in North America

Author
item PICASSO, VALENTIN - University Of Wisconsin
item Casler, Michael
item UNDERSANDER, DANIEL - University Of Wisconsin

Submitted to: Crop Science
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 11/26/2018
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: Climatic extremes demand that alfalfa varieties be resilient. This paper provides the first definition of resilience that can be used as a guide for evaluating resilience of large numbers of alfalfa varieties. Resilience is defined as the ability to withstand a short-term crisis, such as a drought year or severe winter injury. The database consisted of 679 alfalfa varieties evaluated in field trials between 1995 and 2013 at 45 locations in the USA and Canada. The paper demonstrates that resilience can be effectively measured on alfalfa varieties, that varieties differ in resilience, that resilience is highly repeatable across locations, and that the most resilient varieties were those with the greatest disease resistance. These results will be directly applicable to agronomists and breeders of many crop species that are subject to the impacts of extreme climatic conditions.

Technical Abstract: Resilient, stable, and productive forage systems are needed to endure increasingly frequent climatic extremes. However, no assessment of resilience of cultivars has been reported yet. Resilience is the ability of a forage system to withstand and keep producing under a climatic crisis; stability is the minimal variability of yields across normal years; productivity is the average yield across normal years. The goal of this paper was to quantify resilience, stability, and productivity of alfalfa cultivars to identify superior cultivars. Forage yield means from alfalfa cultivar trials from eleven US states and one Canadian province over nineteen years (1995 to 2013) were analyzed using linear mixed models. Quantitative measures for resilience and stability for each cultivar were calculated for the two most extreme crises years in each location. Resilience, stability and productivity were different among cultivars across environments (i.e., crisis year-location combinations), showing that some cultivars are consistently superior. Cultivar resilience was not associated with productivity, which suggests it may be possible to identify cultivars that optimize both traits. Disease resistance was positively associated with cultivar resilience. A coordinated plant breeding approach across many locations is proposed to test and improve cultivar resilience in the future, and develop alfalfa cultivars more profitable in the long term.