The exploring unpredictable effects of climatic changes as sowing dates across different seasons under Egyptian conditions on performance of faba bean varieties will be of great benefit for sustainable production and food security. The determination of G x E interaction and stability in performance across different sowing dates is an important goal for breeding climate-resilient cultivars. Therefore, the present studies evaluated six faba bean cultivars possessed variable genetic backgrounds under four sowing dates extended from Mid-Oct to Dec of 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 seasons at Giza. The stability analyses of performance across the generated eight environments were performed using four parametric and two nonparametric measures of stability. The parametric dynamic approaches included S2di, bi and σ2i in addition to CVi% as static parameters. The two nonparametric stability approaches are rank-sum (RSi) and yield-stability statistic (YSi).
The environmental conditions affected highly significantly all faba bean traits. The studied genotypes varied significantly in performance for yield and components over all environments and from one environment to another for all characters except pods/plant, as proved by the significance of GEI.
Faba bean cultivars varied significantly for mean performance and extents of stability measured by all parameters except stability variance (σ2i) and bi for SYP and SYPlot, respectively. For breeding promising genotypes, it should be screened under several environmental conditions and those showing reliable performance will be evaluated for stability by using variable parameters to avoid violation of occurring statistical errors (either type I or type II), which may conflict the trustiness of recommended cultivars.