| Summary: | Due to specific climatic conditions, perennial ryegrass breeding in Serbia is focused on resistance or tolerance to abiotic stress factors, especially to drought and high temperatures. These traits should be associated with high dry matter yield and quality. Therefore, most frequently used initial material is autochthonous populations and ecotypes adapted to local agro-ecological conditions, but knowledge about their variability of important traits for breeding is missing. Pre-selection evaluation of ten populations of perennial ryegrass originating from Serbia is presented in this paper. Twenty five traits were investigated during the two-year period and processed using analysis of variance and multivariate statistical methods (cluster and principal components analysis). The goal was to determine diversity and genetic distances of investigated populations by phenotyping and to define traits considerably affecting the variability and discrimination of populations. On cluster diagram two groups of population are observed, but geographic origin of populations (lowland, hilly, mountainous habitat) was not influence to clustering of collection. Factor analysis has clarified that first seven principal components (PC) described almost 95%. The traits which show high correlation coefficients with first principal component were plant height in first cut, leaf length and width, DM of generative tillers, spike and spikelet length and 1000 seed weight, and with second principal component time of heading, terminal internode length, DM of vegetative tillers, spikelet number and FSU. It can be concluded that variability between populations was high and that differences of population were mainly affected by most important traits for breeding, such as components of dry matter production and some seed yield components.
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