Objective To evaluate the fruit traits of main Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) cultivars from the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and provide references for the selection of chestnut cultivars with excellent comprehensive performance and suitable for planting and promoting in Zhejiang Province.

Method Twenty-five main Chinese chestnut cultivars in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and five representative northern Chinese chestnut cultivars were used as materials, their fruit phenotype and quality traits were continuously measured and statistically analyzed. Then comprehensive evaluation was performed by principal component analysis and grey correlation analysis.

Result Twenty traits of fruit phenotype and quality had different degrees of variation, and the coefficient of variation ranged from 7.85% to 41.20%. There were 23 pairs and 18 pairs of correlation among all traits reached extremely significant (P<0.01) and significant level (P<0.05), respectively. There was a certain correlation between the fruit phenotype and the quality traits. The cumulative contribution rate of the top five principal components was 79.25%, which retained most of the information of fruit phenotype and quality traits. Grey correlation analysis showed that there were significant differences in the weight values of each trait, in which the weight coefficient of potassium content was the largest and the weight coefficient of total flavonoids content was the smallest. The overall trend of the comprehensive performance ranking of the 30 Chinese chestnut cultivars performed by the two analysis methods was relatively consistent. The correlation coefficient of the comprehensive score of the cultivars by the two analysis was 0.7621, which reached a very significant level.

Conclusion Six Chinese chestnut cultivars from the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River are ranked in the top by the two analysis, the comprehensive performance of their fruit traits is excellent, so the six cultivars can be popularized as the main cultivar in Zhejiang Province.