Data from: Neither yield nor phenology scale from single row to whole plot in chickpea and lentil

Reliable phenotyping is critical for crop improvement. Some traits such as
herbicide tolerance are more likely to scale from plant to crop than
others such as yield. Here we compared phenology, yield and its components
in two arrangements - single rows and whole plots - for 10 chickpea and 10
lentil cultivars in 11 (chickpea) and 10 (lentil) Australian environments
resulting from the combination of location, season, and sowing date. The
cultivars were characterised for key genetic loci for phenology: Elf3a, GI
and the FT gene cluster in chickpea, and GWAS-chr2 and the FTb gene
cluster in lentil. Across environments, yield of chickpea ranged from 33
to 268 g per lineal m (g m-1) in single rows and 5 to 77 g m-1 in whole
plots, and yield of lentil ranged from 20 to 174 g m-1 in single rows and
9 to 104 g m-1 in whole plots. Across environments and genotypes, time to
flowering was later in 207 of 275 chickpea whole plots compared to single
rows and in 175 out of 234 lentil whole plots compared with single rows.
In both chickpea and lentil, flowering and podding varied with the
interaction between genotype, arrangement, and environment, resulting in
altered genotypic rankings between single row and whole plot within and
between environments. Yield components were variably affected by the
three-way interaction; biomass was the only trait showing no interaction
in either crop. Broad sense heritability of seed size fell from 0.60 in
whole plots to 0.37 in single rows for chickpea, and from 0.87 to 0.62 in
lentil. Traits showed variable and sometimes contrary correlations with
yield depending on crop arrangement. In chickpea, early flowering and the
early allele ELF3a were associated with harvest index and yield in whole
plots. In lentil, the early allele of FTb was negatively associated with
time to flowering and podding in whole plots and with the phenological
differences between arrangements. Chickpea and lentil genotypes that were
more responsive to crop arrangement were lower yielding in whole plots. We
highlight the need to understand scaling for agronomically important
traits to avoid wasteful or counterproductive phenotyping and breeding
efforts.