Due to increasing demand for consumption of vegetable oils, oilseeds production is getting a great importance. Among the oilseed crops, safflower is one of the more adapted crops to Iran's climate and has more tolerance to environmental stresses, particularly to the drought stress. Safflower is grown as the main crop and also as the second crop after harvesting the small grain crops in a large scale in Isfahan province. This study was conducted to investigate the relationships among agro-morphologic traits and the response to selection for seed yield and it's components in safflower. In this research, 25 genotypes of safflower were evaluated in a randomized complete block design with three replications at the research farm of Isfahan University of Technology in 2014. The results showed that there were significant differences among the genotypes for all of the studied traits, except for days to emergence, plant height and seed yield per plant. A high to moderate broad-sense heritability was estimated for all of the traits, except for seed yield per plant that had a low heritability. There was a slight difference between the genotypic and phenotypic coefficients of variation for most of the traits, indicating that most of the observed variation was due to the genetic factors. The results of correlation coefficients indicated that there was a high association among the phonologic traits. The stepwise regression showed that the yield components of seeds per capitulum and number of capitulum per plant contributed in most of the variation for seed yield per plant. Also, the path analysis for seed yield per plant indicted that seeds per capitulum and number of capitulum per plant had high direct effects on this trait. Clustering based on the phonologic traits, seed oil content, seed weight and seeds per capitulum ltr" Keywords Safflower, Genetic parameter, Agronomic traits, Direct and indirect selection
