Gallacher, D. J.
Abstract:
Genotypic, environmental, interaction, and error variances were studied for each of 24 qualitative and 142 quantitative morphological characters. Data were collected in 3 character sets: vegetative macromorphological, inflorescence, and epidermal. Broad-sense heritability was estimated for quantitative characters, and variance components were estimated. Non-zero significance was determined for variance components of all characters. Many characters were identified as having a large genetic component to their variation. Optimising the descriptive power of vegetative macromorphology characters requires the use of test clones to quantify the environmental effect, and a high level of sampling to reduce error variance. Less work is required for inflorescence characters, which are mostly highly heritable. Some valuable epidermal characters were identified.