Combining NDVI and Bacterial Blight Score to Predict Grain Yield in Field Pea

Field pea is the most commonly grown temperate pulse crop, with close to 15 million tons produced globally in 2020. Varieties improved through breeding are important to ensure ongoing improvements in yield and disease resistance. Genomic selection (GS) is a modern breeding approach that could substantially improve the rate of genetic gain for grain yield, and its deployment depends on the prediction accuracy (PA) that can be achieved. In our study, four yield trials representing breeding lines' advancement stages of the breeding program (S0, S1, S2, and S3) were assessed with grain yield, aerial high-throughput phenotyping (normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI), and bacterial blight disease scores (BBSC). Low-to-moderate broad-sense heritability (0.31–0.71) and narrow-sense heritability (0.13–0.71) were observed, as the estimated additive and non-additive genetic components for the three traits varied with the different models fitted. The genetic correlations among the three traits were high, particularly in the S0–S2 stages. NDVI and BBSC were combined to investigate the PA for grain yield by univariate and multivariate GS models, and multivariate models showed higher PA than univariate models in both cross-validation and forward prediction methods. A 6–50% improvement in PA was achieved when multivariate models were deployed. The highest PA was indicated in the forward prediction scenario when the training population consisted of early generation breeding stages with the multivariate models. Both NDVI and BBSC are commonly used traits that could be measured in the early growth stage; however, our study suggested that NDVI is a more useful trait to predict grain yield with high accuracy in the field pea breeding program, especially in diseased trials, through its incorporation into multivariate models.