Variations in Morphometries of Fruits. Seed and Dendrometric Measurements of Adansonia digitata L. in Sudan
Keywords:
Baobab tree,, Dendrometric, Diversity, Fruits traits, Climatic zoneAbstract
Though Baobab (Adansonia digitata L) tree is one of the important multi-purpose species, the characteristics of its fruit, have rarely been researched and hence remain underutilized or not domesticated yet. With the aim of helping domestication and consequently improvement of baobab fruits, morphological variations in relation to locations of baobab tree have been studied in two genetically isolated different populations, namely the Blue Nile and Kordofan states each state having three sites were selected where random sampling was carried. For morphometric measurements, 30-78 individual trees were randomly sampled within each baobab population. Baobab fruit traits were correlated with fruit pulp. The Analysis of the variance of the parameters was performed following the F-variance test. Analysis of variance for different characters showed significant differences in fruit traits between study sites. The dendrometic results were also significantly different (P≤ 0.05) between the studied populations/locations. Trees from ElGerri site were the smallest and shortest in DBH and height, respectively. Fruits from Elroseies site had the largest values (long; 18.29 cm±5.72, width; 9.40 cm ±2.13 and heavy; 264.17g ±99.23). There was a trend that the heavier the fruit, the greater the number of seeds. The pulp weight percentage was found to be significantly higher both at El Mansora site and KourTaggat than at other study sites. In general, trends at Blue Nile state study sites were found to be superior to others regarding fruit weight, fruit length, and pulp percent. The variability in these characteristics presents valuable information that might be used for the choice of a close relative for advanced baobab high-quality planting material.
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