VISUALIZING ADAPTATION OF GENOTYPES WITH A TERNARY PLOT

Adaptation can be studied through various methods, some of which are based on adaptation or stability measures while others on complex models and graphs. In this paper a simple adaptation measure based on quantiles is presented; the measure is three-dimensional and can be pictured with a ternary (trilinear) plot. A simple algorithm for constructing such a plot is presented and the interpretation of the plot is discussed. By means of this graphical tool one can picture and interpret the specific and wide adaptation of genotypes to environments, offering complementary information to that of other methods of analyzing genotype-by-environment data.