Morphological phylogeny among 15 accessions of bamboos growing in Kokrajhar district of the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts, Assam

Abstract

Bamboo is nature’s wonderful gift historically associated with the rural population of the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts. However, indiscriminate use of the resource and the ambiguity in the identification of bamboos in the absence of flowering characters pose a potential risk to the bamboo germplasm. Therefore, we considered revising the taxonomic positions and phylogenetic relationships among 15 tropical bamboo species using 35 key morphological descriptors (MD) to assess the reliability of vegetative characters in identifying species. The phylogenetic tree constructed from the similarity matrix, derived from an unweighted pair group method of analysis (UPGMA) of the 35 MDs, marginally deviated from the conventional taxonomic positions of the bamboo species. While the two varieties, one forma of Bambusa vulgaris (var. Vittata, var. Vulgaris, fo. Waminii) and two species of the genus Dendrocalamus (D. giganteus and D. hamiltonii) clustered together in a single clade, and D. strictus was distantly placed from their congeners. This discrepancy with the conventional classification might have ensued since only vegetative characters such as culm anatomy, culm sheath, leaf, and leaf sheath were considered in the present study. While the phylogenetic relationship among the 15 tropical bamboos (computed from exhaustive MDs) grossly corroborate the conventional taxonomic grouping, a molecular-marker-based multidisciplinary approach should resolve the remaining conflicts in bamboo identification.