Asian Journal of Plant and Soil Sciences

Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman) is a widely cultivated food crop in southern parts of Ethiopia. This highly valuable crop is only domesticated in Ethiopia and adapted to the high-altitude areas, of Ethiopia. The overall objective of this study is to document the diversity of enset (Ensete ventricosum) landraces and associated indigenous knowledge of farmers in the selected sites in the Kefa Zone (Gesha, Saylem, Decha, and Adiyio) districts in southwestern Ethiopia. The selections of study districts were made purposefully uniform method based on their agroecology and accessibility; three kebeles were made from each district bringing the total number of sampled households to 120. In the study data on enset landraces and farmers' indigenous methods of naming, classification, and identification of landraces were gathered using semi-structured interviews, field observation, and focus group discussion. A total of 72 enset landraces were recorded from household’s survey and among these, landraces locally called Bejo, Shelako, Nobo, Boco, Gushiro, Yeko, and Areko were found to be the most dominant, widely distributed and highly preferred landraces in the area. The highest number of landraces,44 was recorded from Gesha districts, and the least number of landraces 31 was recorded from Adiyio district with the relative, Simpson’s Diversity index values ranging between 0.939 (Gesha) to 0.908 (Adiyio) while H′ ranged between 3.27 (Gesha) to 2.91 in Adiyio. On the other hand, Sorenson’s similarity index value indicated the existence of high similarity between the Sylem and Gesha districts, and the least similarity value was obtained between Adiyio and Gesha districts. For identification of different enset landraces farmers used morphological descriptors such as leaf color, pseudo stem color, midrib color, Plant size, and circumference of the Plant. Although there is a high diversity of enset landraces in the area, the production and productivity of the crop are reported to be under significant stress due to various environmental problems such as bacterial wilt and animal pests. Thus, there is a need for a multidisciplinary approach to resolve the problems, maintain the diversity of enset landraces, and ensure the long-term sustainability of the system.