Abstract:

Based on the investigation of 21 kinds of two-year-old elm variations, analysis of variance (ANOVA), contrastive analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) methods were applied to investigate their growth characteristics. The results demonstrated significant differences among elm’s diameter at breast height (DBH), height, crown height and crown diameter. The first two principal components explained 89.24％ of the variance and properly described the characters of the total data. Based on the PCA results, we divided the 21 kinds of elm variations into 4 groups and discussed their application potentialities. This work determined the different elm variations’ characteristics and gave an example to assess plant growth.

Key words: Ulmus pumila clones; difference; analysis and evaluation