Vol. 10, Issue 2 (2021)

Author(s):
K Pavithra, N Maragatham, GA Dheebakaran, A Senthil and V Geethalakshmi

Abstract:
Drought, salinity, moisture stress and increasing temperature are the key abiotic factors that results in the reduction of crop yield severely all over the world. A pot culture study was conducted in ACRC to study the effect of heat and moisture stress on Blackgram productivity. The aim of this study is to assess the response of Blackgram to moisture stress on photosynthetic gas exchange and yield parameters under both ambient and elevated temperature (+2 °C). Two major Blackgram varieties (CO 6 and VBN 6) were taken for this study. The experiment results revealed that, moisture stress at vegetative phase restricted the plant height, Net Photosynthetic Rate, Stomatal Conductance, and Transpiration Rate in both cultivars. Similarly, the plants under stressed condition during flowering stage exhibited reduction in number of pods per plant on average of 9.7 and seeds per pod on average of 3.9 in CO 6 whereas VBN 6 under ambient condition resulted in 18.5 pods per plant and 8.6 seeds per pod. The results revealed that, VBN 6 is physiologically efficient and resulted in moderate yield compared to CO 6 even with water stress and high temperature condition.