Collection and morphological characterization of sweet potato landraces in north of Rio de Janeiro state

The traditional farmers play an important role in plant genetic resources conservation. Collecting the germplasm maintained by these farmers is a very important action to avoid genetic variability losses. The goals of this work were to collect sweet potato from farms in the north of Rio de Janeiro state; to gather information regarding to the farmers profile, and to characterize the sweet potato landraces collected using morphological descriptors. Fifty three farms were visited in six collection expedition and 46 accessions were collected. During the visits the farmers were interviewed using a query with ten items. Six root traits and eight descriptors for vegetative parts were used for morphological characterization. The data were analyzed based on Cole-Rodgers distance and clustering was done with UPGMA method. Familiar agriculture with subsistence objective was observed and sweet potato was cultivated by 72% of the farmers at least for more than a decade, supporting the observation that this vegetable is traditionally cultivated in small areas in the specific region. The morphological characterization was efficient to detect genetic variability among accessions, revealing that traditional farmers from Campos dos Goytacazes and Sao Joao da Barra are responsible for sweet potato genotypes conservation with expressive genetic diversity in their properties. There was no relationship between genetic distance and collecting areas.