Breeding for drought tolerance is becoming a more and more important challenge in case of crop plants, notably in wheat in Europe, not only in the Mediterranean area, but in central Europe too. The breeding process includes the characterization of the basic breeding material in regard to performance under well-watered and drought stressed conditions. For our experiments we set up a mobile automatic rain shelter (MARS) system in the breeding nursery and a complex stress diagnostic system (CSDS) in greenhouse tests of the Cereal Research Non-Profit Limited Company, where we could analyze the responses of different wheat materials to drought stress. Wheat plants were grown under ideal water regime in parallel experiments using sprinkler irrigation and shadowing by MARS. In greenhouse the tested wheat materials were grown under optimal (watering to 60% of the 100% soil water capacity) and suboptimal stress (watering to 20%) conditions. The effect of water withholding on plant growing was registered by a digital imaging system in CSDS and traditional way under MARS. After harvesting, plant heights, spike lengths, grain numbers, total grain weights and other agronomical parameters were measured and values of well-watered and stressed plants were compared.
