VARIABILITY AND ASSOCIATION STUDIES OF PHENOTYPIC CHARACTERS CONTRIBUTING TO YIELD IN FONIO MILLET (DIGITARIA IBURUA STAPF) ACCESSIONS

The study on fourteen fonio accessions explored the available variability, investigated component association and grouped the total variability into Principal components. The experiment was conducted with three replications using Randomized Complete Block Design. Most characters showed Significant differences among the accessions at 5% probability level. Phenotypic coefficient of variability was more significant than genotypic coefficients, indicating environmental impacts, though minimal. Grain yield was highly influenced by number of tillers and height, as indicated by correlation and path coefficients. Plant height and days to maturity showed positive impact on fonio yield. Among the nine principal components realized, three had eigen values greater than one, contributing a total variation of about 79.2%. PC1 had the highest Eigen value of 3.77 with the highest load (-0.442) in days to maturity. Selection and hybridization with attention on plant height, number of tillers per plant and panicle length of the population could help improve on the grain yield.