Soil or water salinity is one of the factors limiting the growth and performance of agricultural plants in arid and semi-arid areas, at the same time, the response of the populations of each area to salinity may be different. Evaluating the tolerance of nigella populations to environmental stresses, especially salinity stress and its effect on different traits and organs of nigella at different stages of growth is an important factor in selecting them for cultivation in different conditions.
This experiment is factorial in the form of a completely randomized design on 4 black seed populations (Busher, Semirom, Khuzestan and Sarvestan) with four levels of salinity (0, 40, 80 and 120 mM) with three replications in the greenhouse of the Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the Persian Gulf. Morphological traits such as germination date, number of flowers per plant, number of main branches, number of secondary branches, plant height, flower size, capsule size, weight of 1000 seeds, number of seeds per plant, number of seeds per capsule, number of capsules per plant, yield Seed, seed dry weight, capsule weight, number of days to flowering, number of days to maturity and phytochemical traits including oil percentage, chlorophyll content and proline content were measured.
According to the obtained results, the Semirom population can be introduced as the superior population in this research due to its superiority in most traits under salinity stress conditions. Also, the most important traits affecting the weight of the number of seeds per plant were oil percentage and height, which can be used in breeding research with regard to them in order to screen genotypes and cultivars in order to obtain tolerant genotypes on Salinity stress made a choice.