Morphological Attributes of Root Systems and Seedling Growth in Three Species of Pistacia

• Autor(a) principal: Baninasab,Bahram
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Outros Autores: Mobli,Mostafa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0870-63522008000300003
• topic: Morphological characters; Pistacia vera; P. mutica; P. khinjuk

Iran is one of the most important growing centers for wild and domesticated species/varieties of pistachio. Because of the adaptability of wild pistachio species to severe environmental conditions and resistance to drought and some pest and diseases, these can be used as rootstock for pistachio cultivars and in breeding programs for rootstock improvement. The present study aims to evaluate the seedling behavior of Pistacia vera, P. mutica and P. khinjuk at the inter-specific level. The results showed significant differences among species for most of the measured traits indicating high genetic variability among these species. P. vera showed highest stem height, stem diameter, shoot and root fresh and dry weights. P. vera also produced more leaves, more number and longer roots per seedling than the other two species. The correlation between various morphological traits showed that many of the associations between morphological traits of shoot and root vary between these three species. However, only leaf number was found to be common and important morphological trait for these three species to evaluate stem diameter of Pistacia species before their nursery test.