Author(s):
The study was conducted using thirty six upland rice genotypes during the 2017 main rainy season at two experimental sites of Bonga agricultural research center; southwestern Ethiopia to classify and identify groups of similar genotypes and thereby estimate the genetic difference between clusters of the genotypes, the experiment was laid down in 6 × 6 simple lattice design. The combined analysis of variance over the two locations revealed that the genotypes showed highly significant (P ≤ 0.01) differences for all the characters studied, except for days to 50% heading, panicle weight, thousand seed weight, lodging incidences, leaf blast and brown spot. Similarly genotype × location interactions revealed highly significant (P ≤ 0.01) differences for panicle shattering and grain yield and significant (P ≤ 0.05) differences for days to 85% maturity, plant height, number of fertile tillers per plant, number of unfilled spikelets per panicle and biomass yield. The squared distance (D2) analysis grouped the 36 genotypes in to four clusters. This makes the genotypes become moderately divergent. The chi-square (x2) test showed that all inter-cluster squared distances was highly significant. The principal component analysis revealed that four principal components have accounted for 70.54% of the total variation.
