Development of Mega-Environment for Maize in India using GIS approach

Abstract

Greater emphasis on future constraints to agricultural production are motivated by the projections of environmental change. The speed of population, change in climate and environmental has pressurized the crop community to understand the importance of those stresses which may result in the significant declines in yield. Advances in data availability, advance information technology, and new and improved methods to target genotypes to environments have benefited the crop improvement practices. No methodology is found in literature which integrates factors like climate, soil, land cover etc., and can predict the most suitable environment (Area) for growing maize based on its genetic variability for India. Therefore, a methodology is needed which considers the integration of factors like climate, soil, land cover etc., to map the most suitable Mega- Environment for growing maize based on their genetic variability. Mega-environment can be defined as a part, which may not necessarily be contiguous, of growing region of any species of a particular crop, with homogeneous environment which encourages similar genotypes to perform best. The MEs (homogeneous environments of production delineated on the basis of an agro-climatic) are helpful to the crop breeders in managing the genotype-by-environment interactions and then extrapolate the same within similar agro climatic areas. MEs are known to be broad and may not necessarily be contiguous growing areas, which are international and frequently transcontinental, They have similar cropping system requirements, biotic and abiotic stresses, consumer preferences and production volume of the relevant crop, enough to justify attention," for example, "tropical lowland, late-maturing, white dent" corn with relevant disease resistances, which occupies 3.8 million hectares across 18 countries (CIMMYT1, 1989a). Sites suitable as testing sites for the selection of new varieties to be sown with specific and wide adaptability to different environmental conditions can be identified. Over the period of time, the concept of global maize mega-environments (MEs) has been developed a defined by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) and its partners. The MEs (homogeneous production environments defined on the basis of agro-climate) help the crop breeders to manage genotype-by-environment interactions and to extrapolate them within similar agro climatic zones (Hartkamp et al., 2000). In this research study, an effort has been made to using GIS to map/ identify mega environment for breeding of maize crop for all over the India.