Abstract:Abstract: Lolium multiflorum is a wildly cultivated temperate forage grass in the world. In order to screen elite ryegrass germplasm resources, variation coefficient, correlation analysis, principal component analysis and cluster analysis were conducted to analyze the 15 phenotypic traits for 15 intruduced L.multiflorum accessions. The results showed high phenotypic variability among the 15 studied accessions, and significant difference was seen in most of characters except dry matter yield . The variant coefficient varied from 10.28% to 39.15% with an average of 19.49%, in descending order, by spikelets, length of spikelets, plant height, tiller number, 1000-kernel weight, panicle length, length of penultimate leaf, number of florets per spikelet, stem diameter, length of first internode, width of penultimate leaf, width of flag leaf, length of flag leaf, dry matter yield per plant and fresh matter yield per plant. Principal components analysis of 15 traits showed the cumulative proportion of top 5 principal components reached 84.50% with plant height as the first component, leaf traits as the second component, inflorescence characters as the third component, 1000-kernel weight as the fourth component, and forage yield as the fifth component. Cluster analysis based on Euclidean distance showed that the 15 annual ryegrass accessions could be divided into 3 groups, among which there were significant differences for most traits. The second group had the high yield potential in elite germplasm screening.