Establishing An Applied Breeding Program for Flood Tolerance in Sea Oats.

Sea oats, Uniola paniculata, is the dominant foredune grass of the southeastern Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the United States. Sea oats reduce erosion by building and stabilizing sand dunes. Unfortunately, natural populations no longer exist in Louisiana, possibly because of low dune profiles and/ or limited genetic diversity. To address these issues, the Louisiana State University’s Agricultural Center (LSU AgCenter) initiated the first and only sea oats breeding program in the United States. The main goal of this program is to increase the genetic diversity of sea oats clones used in Louisiana coastal restoration projects and to develop improved clones that survive in Louisiana’s beach environments. To initiate the breeding program, panicles from 8 states were harvested in 2001. After extensive field evaluations, 158 clones were selected based upon plant productivity and performance in Louisiana’s saturated beach environment. To increase the efficiency of the LSU AgCenter’s sea oats breeding program, an alternative to expensive and labor intensive replicated field trials is needed. In 2009, a study was initiated to develop a protocol for identifying flood tolerant seedlings in greenhouse trials.  Three months old seedlings were subjected to cyclic or static flooding, at four depths, for four months.  Plant height, root length, total fresh weight and mortality were measured every 28 days. Plants grown in the flooded treatments were significantly taller (p<0.001) than plants grown under normal conditions (control). Plants grown in the flooded treatments also had significantly more fresh weight (p<0.001) than the control. Finally, the control treatment had significantly longer roots (p<0.001) than plants grown in flooded treatments. From this study, we have identified and selected one flood treatment to screen additional seedlings for flood tolerance in the greenhouse.