An-Najah Staff

Oat (Avena sativa L.) is a cereal widely grown as a spring crop throughout the temperate zones, beingparticularly adapted to areas with cool and wet summers such as Northwest Europe and Canada. There isscope for further oat expansion in Mediterranean Basin where the crop will face hot and dry weather. Inthis work, we assessed adaptation of 32 modern oat cultivars from different origin and usage to autumnsowings under Mediterranean agroecological conditions. Experiments were carried out over four cropseasons at 6 contrasting locations along Mediterranean Basin, including Spain, Tunisia, Egypt and Pales-tinian Territories. ANOVA analysis revealed genotype × environment interactions. For test environmentand genotype evaluation heritability-adjusted genotype plus genotype × environment (HA-GGE), biplotanalysis was performed. Biplot analysis differentiate two mega-environments one comprising the loca-tions of Egypt and Palestinian Territories and another including Spain and Tunisia. Pearson’s correlationand HA-biplots confirmed overall a positive correlation between yield and HI, and a negative correlationbetween yield and rust and flowering date. For other traits, relations among the traits differed dependingon the ME evaluated. The study allowed determining within each ME the best discriminative location,representative of the target environment and repeatable across year and the genotypes with superiorand stable characteristic for breeding of adapted oats.

Global climate change is predicted as a result of increased concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. It is predicted that climate change will result in increasing temperature by 2 to 6◦C and a possible reduction of precipitation of up to 16% in the Mediterranean basin. In this study, the West Bank is taken as a case study from the Mediterranean basin to evaluate the effects of such climate change on water resources availability and agricultural water demands. Due to the uncertainty in climate change impacts on temperature and precipitation, a number of scenarios for these impacts were assumed within the range of predicted changes. For temperature, three scenarios of 2, 4 and 6◦C increase were assumed. For precip- itation, two scenarios of no change and 16% precipitation reduction were assumed. Based on these scenarios, monthly evapotranspiration and monthly precipitation excess depths were estimated at seven weather stations distributed over the different climatic and geographical areas of the West Bank. GIS spatial analyses showed that the increase in temperature predicted by climate change could potentially increase agricultural water demands by up to 17% and could also result in reducing annual groundwater recharge by up to 21% of existing values. However, the effects of reduced precipitation resulting from climate change are more enormous as a 16% reduction in precipitation could result in reducing annual groundwater recharge in the West Bank by about 30% of existing value. When this effect is combined with a6◦C increase in temperature, the reduction in groundwater recharge could reach 50%