458 Inheritance of Tree Size in Pistachio (Pistacia vera L.)

Trunk cross-sectional area from a population of 6192 pistachio trees was used to estimate tree growth from 1995 to 1997. The narrow-sense heritabilities of trunk cross-sectional area were near zero across multiple locations based on analyses of progenies from 20 half-sib families. However, within individual location, there were values from 0.20 to 0.56 for 1995, 1996, and 1997, respectively. Broad-sense heritability estimates were considerably higher, from 0.36 to 0.64 at multiple locations and 0.51 to 1.35 for individual locations. These results suggest that dominance and significant interaction effects, epistatic and genotype by environment, were important. Breeding strategies should emphasize selection of superior parents based on individual performance, and parents should be selected in the environment in which the progeny are intended to be used.