I - --ii

170
At the end of the severe cold period, the lines were scor.d for cold tolerance on
the I to 3 scale used at Tel Hadya. The results are shown in Tab. 2. Sixty-four
percent of the entries showed no damage and 36% had temporary signs of cold
injury. Throughout the winter the plants grew little, which may explain the lack
of severe damage.
Table 2
Screening chickpea lines for tolerance to cold at Terbol, Lebanon, during 1978--79.
Rating No. of entries %of entries
I 2036 63.98
2 1146 36.92
3 0 0.00
Total 3182 100
Evaluation at Hymana
A total of 3158 kabuli accessions from germplasm collection were screened for
cold tolerance at Hymana near Ankara during 1979-80. The material was sown
in October 1979 in unreplicated 2-m rows, spaced 60 cm apart. The local chickpea
landrace (ILC 1931) was sown after every nine test entries. Plant emergence
was recorded before the onset of very severe winter conditions. The lowest air
temperature during December 1979 and January, February and March 1980
were -9.0,-26.8, -12.3 and -1 3.8°C, respectively. The plants were covered with
snow for 47 days.
At the end of the winter, the surviving plants of each entry were counted.
Later, all entries were classified according to percentage survival using a 1-5
scale, where 1 = 100% ( highly tolerant); 2 = 67-99% (tolerant); 3 = 34-66%
(medium tolerance); 4 = 1-33% (susceptible); 5 = 0% plants (highly susceptible)
survival.
The results are presented in Tab. 3. Four lines, namely, ILC 2636 (ex-India),
ILC 410 (ex-Iran), ILC 2479 and ILC 2491 (ex-India) were highly tolerant to
cold. Another two lines, ILC 2406 and ILC 2529 (ex-India), were tolerant and 23
lines had a rating.of 3. The remaining lines were rated 4 or 5.
Discussion
There appears to be no published report on screening kabuli chickpeas to cold
tolerance. Thus this screening is probably the first major effort in screening such
a large number of kabuli accessions for cold tolerance at lowland and intermedi­