Drought resistance evaluation during the germination and seedling stages of forage oats

In this study, we used 39 forage oat varieties as research objects, performing PEG-6000 simulated drought stress test at the germination and seedling stages. We comprehensively evaluated the drought resistance of the tested oat varieties using principal component analysis and the membership function method. Our results demonstrated that the simulated drought stress significantly affected the indices of the two growth stages. The germination potential variation coefficient was the highest (285.54%), followed by the germination drought resistance index (51.45%). At the seedling stage, the aboveground dry biomass variation coefficient and relative conductivity were 31.32% and 24.93%, respectively. Next, we clustered the 39 materials into four categories: high drought resistance (grade I), drought resistance (grade II), non-drought resistance (grade III), and drought sensitive (grade IV) types. Among them, 'Gunners’ displayed high drought resistance in both periods. By analyzing the linear relationship between the comprehensive drought resistance evaluation values at the germination and seedling stages, we revealed that no significant correlation could be registered between the drought resistance of the two periods, indicating that oats might exhibit different drought resistances at different growth stages.