Agriculturae Conspectus Scientificus, Vol 88, No 4 (2023)

Multivariate Analysis of Morphometric Traits Revealed Phenotypic Diversity of Arsi-Bale Goats Reared in Bale Eco-Regions, Ethiopia

Mesay GUYO, Aberra MELESSE, Mestawet TAYE

Pages: 325-335

Summary


Ethiopia has genetically diverse goat ecotypes contributing to the rural livelihoods across various production agroecologies. As a result, this study aimed at evaluating the phenotypic diversity of Arsi-Bale goat populations using morphometric traits across the three eco-regions of the Bale zone. Multistage purposive sampling procedures were applied for the study. Sixteen morphometric traits were measured from 424 local goats. Multivariate analyses were performed to differentiate the studied goat populations using morphometric traits. Except body weight (BW), heart girth (HG), rump length (RL), and chest width (CW), variations for the rest morphometric traits were significant (P < 0.05) among the three agroecologies. All morphometric traits were affected by age (P < 0.05) while nonsignificant (P > 0.05) for sex. All 16 morphometric traits were subjected to stepwise discriminant analysis from which 13 of them were identified as having the best discriminating power traits. The canonical discriminate analysis showed that the characters tended to separate into two canonical (CAN) variables. The CAN1 explained about 89.1% of the variation while 10.9% of it was explained by CAN2. Thus, the largest Mahalanobis distance was observed between the highlands and the lowlands (11.2), while it was intermediate among the midlands (4.8) approaching  the highlands. The quadratic discriminate function assigns about 80.0, 83.6 and 93.23% of the goat populations to their origin populations in highland, midland and lowland agroecologies, respectively. However, 20% from highland and 6.7% from lowland populations were misclassified to midlands, whereas 9.48 and 6.90% populations from midlands were misclassified to highlands and lowlands, respectively. This indicated the presence of assimilated populations in the midlands and highlands, with hit rates of 16 and 20%, respectively. Thus, the phenotypic diversities described were more appreciated for utilizing, preserving and improving interventions for existing genetic diversity across agroecologies.


Keywords


agroecology, Arsi-Bale goats, morphometric traits, phenotypic diversity

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