New agricultural wheat frontier in Brazil: Envirotypes applied in the adaptability and stability of wheat genotypes in contrasting environments

Abstract Global climate changes can dramatically impact wheat production in Brazil's Cerrado biome, considered a new wheat farming frontier. Therefore, new approaches are needed to better understand the G×E interaction in environments with high climate variations. Here, we integrate envirotyping, adaptability, and stability techniques to better understand the G×E interaction and provide new insights for the recommendation of tropical wheat genotypes that can perform well in hotter and drier environments. Thirty-six wheat genotypes were evaluated for grain yield in eight field trials in 2018, 2019, and 2020 in the Brazilian Cerrado region. There is strong evidence that even in irrigated conditions, temperatures > 30 ºC during the booting and heading/flowering stages dramatically reduce the grain yield. Two lines, VI14774 (GY = 3800 kg ha-1), and VI14980 (GY = 4093 kg ha-1) had better performance in the hotter environment (~ 22% and ~ 32% higher than the grand mean) and are potential germplasm sources for warmer environments at the boosting and heading/flowering stages. Overall, this study provides new insights on how the environment typing can be useful to better understand the genotype-by-environment interaction and help to breed new climate-resilient wheat cultivars for the cerrado region. In this study, the REML/BLUP and GGE Biplot methods highly correlate in terms of genotype classification for selection and recommendation purposes. The genotypes VI 14127, VI 14197, VI 14026, and BRS 264 are the closest to a hypothetical ideal genotype.