Brazil is the largest producer and consumer of palm heart in the world. Its economic importance brings the need for studies to support the selection of superior individuals for breeding programs of species. Thus, the objective of this study was determinate the repeatability coefficient of the production characteristics of peach palm to palm heart in order to estimate the minimum number of evaluations capable of providing levels of certainty to the prediction of the progenies actual value. It was evaluated four cycles of cultivation of 85 half-sib progenies of peach palm race macrocarpa Putumayo. The experiment was conducted in randomized blocks and evaluated: base mass of the palm heart, mass of first and second quality of the palm heart, number of stalks per tiller, and diameter of the palm heart tillers per plot. Analysis of variance, principal components and structural determination of the repeatability coefficient and number of measurements were performed. There is regularity in predicting the superiority of individuals over the measurements for all traits. It takes seven cycles of measurements to predict the actual value of all traits of the progenies with 85% accuracy by the method of principal components based on the matrix of phenotypic variance and covariance.
Bactris gasipaes; yield; progenies; measurements number
