Rain-out shelters provide an effective tool to establish controlled water-stress environments by excluding undesired rain events and have been widely used in the selection and breeding of cool-season turfgrass for improved drought tolerance. However, the efficiency of recurrent selection using rain-out shelters has seldomly been investigated. In this study, we documented the selection process of tall fescue in one cycle of recurrent selection, compared the drought tolerance of two consecutive generations and estimated selection gain of tall fescue using rain-out shelters. Depending on days of drought, relative selection gain ranges from −4.20% to 3.60%, indicating small and unstable improvement from the parental generation. A subsequent analysis of experimental data using Bayesian mixed linear model revealed low narrow-sense heritability estimations (0.18 for parental generation and 0.08 for progeny generation), providing an explanation for this observation.

中文翻译：

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使用避雨棚对耐旱高羊茅（Festuca arundinacea）的反复选择进行评估

避雨棚提供了一种有效的工具，通过排除不希望的降雨事件来建立受控的缺水压力环境，并已广泛用于冷季草坪的选择和培育，以提高耐旱性。然而，很少有人研究使用避雨棚进行循环选择的效率。在这项研究中，我们记录了高羊茅在一个循环选择周期中的选择过程，比较了连续两代的耐旱性和使用避雨棚估计高羊茅的选择增益。根据干旱天数，相对选择增益范围从 -4.20% 到 3.60%，表明亲代的改进很小且不稳定。