To evaluate the agronomic and morphological characters, and to clasi1 of a part of gene bank barley collection and to determine the relationship between germplasms from northern regions of Iran, a total of 424 samples from 5 provinces were planted in 1-m rows at a distance of 15 cm at alternate spacing. This trial was carried out in a simple experiment without replication. Results from the evaluation of 27 qualitative and quantitative characters showed that barley landrace populations from the north of Iran are composed of 3groups namely: 2-row barley (43.2%) irregular- row (42.2%), and 6- row barley (14.6%). There was much diversity in some characters such as stem pigmentation, auricle pigmentation and lemma awn barbs, grain yield ,harvest index, 1000-grain weight, days to flowering, date of spike initiation ,and plant height. Grain yield correlated positively with characters, such as plant height, days to flowering, number of spikelet groups, spike length,biomass yield, straw weight Length of rachilla hairs correlated negatively with plant height and spike length, but positively with spike density. Adjusted R square showed that 94% of grain yield variations are dependent on factors like biomass yield, harvest index, straw weight, plant height, and days to flowering. Cluster analysis was used for grouping of geographical zones as related to investigated samples. The results showed that there is good relationship between genetic and geographical classification among origins of samples when using morphological characters for cluster analysis, while no relationship was found between genetic diversity and geographical classification when all characters or quantitive characters were taken into account.
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