Selection of promising chestnuts (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Castanea sativa</Emphasis>) among wild growing trees from southern Mediterranean region forests of Turkey

Turkey ranked third place in the world for chestnut production after China and South Korea and the country has unique chestnut forests including valuable and diverse chestnut genotypes. This study was conducted to select superior chestnut genotypes within seedling populations found in natural wild grown chestnut forest located in Isparta province in Turkey during 2010–2011 years. A total of 2500 wild grown chestnut trees were examined on the field first year and among them the most promising 22 genotypes were chosen according to relatively high yield capacity, earliness, tolerance to chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), ink disease (Phytopthora cambivora), and fruit quality characteristics. The selected 22 genotypes were evaluated for their detailed morphological, phenological and pomological traits in 2010 and 2011. According to average of 2 years, nut weight, the number of nut per kilogram, nut width, nut length, nut height and nut shell thickness of 22 promising genotypes ranged from 10.26 to 22.32 g, 97.47 to 44.80/kg, 26.80 to 42.47, 16.92 to 25.91, 27.74 to 39.73, and 0.26 to 1.01 mm, respectively. The ash, crude protein, and total fat content of kernels were between 0.85 to 1.94, 3.69 to 7.06 and 1.32 to 4.52, respectively. The genotypes were evaluated with weighted ranking method and the highest general quality score was observed in genotypes of IY17, IY01, IY42, IY43 and IY12.