Laboratoire de Gestion et Valorisation de la Biodiversité au Sahel (GeVaBioS), Faculté des Sciences et Techniques, BP 10662 Ny, Université Abdou Moumouni, Niger
Bambara groundnut is a food legume grown mainly by women. In Niger, this plant is mainly cultivated without improved techniques, while improving the production of this crop can contribute to ensuring food security. The objective of this work is to characterize twenty-nine accessions of Bambara groundnut cultivated in the Far West region of Niger to evaluate their agro-morphological diversity and selected the best accessions for yield. The study was carried out according to a randomized complete block design with four replications. Sixteen (16) characters, including four (4) phenological, four (4) morphological, and eight (8) related to yield, were evaluated to characterize the accessions. Descriptive statistical analysis showed coefficients of variation fluctuating between 2.80% and 40.46%. Significantly high values (CV˃20%) were observed for 8 of the 16 metric traits analyzed. The strongest correlations reflecting a high variability of the characters within the studied collection are obtained between the number of petioles and the number of leaves (r=0.99), the weight of seeds and the yield (r=0.99), pod weight and seed weight (r=0.97), pod weight and yield (r=0.97).The results revealed a great morphological diversity of the vegetative and yield characters allowing to group the accessions in three (3) groups of which the first one is composed of accessions performing in the characters related to the yield, the second one is composed of accessions performing in yield and seeds, and the third one gathers the accessions having similar phenological characters. Accessions Do 024 (782.60 kg/ha), Do 001 (732.51 kg/ha), Do 013 (688.33 kg/ha), and Do 016 (685.84 kg/ha), Do 019 (646, 02 kg/ha), Do 011 (623.16 kg/ha), Do 007 (623.00kg/ha), Do 036 (621.60 kg/ha) and Do 003 (605.42 kg/ha) produced the highest yields in kg/ha.