The Bengkulu Province in Indonesia is a natural habitat for various orchid species; however, its biodiversity currently faces threats from human activities and natural disasters. Precise identification and classification of these orchid species are essential for their future conservation. Hence, the presented study sought to characterize the 35 wild orchid accessions from Bengkulu’s forests and construct a phylogenetic tree based on morphological data. The accessions’ collection ensued through germplasm exploration conducted in Bengkulu Province. Then, growing the collected accessions ex situ pursued evaluating their morphological characteristics. Evidently, the 597 sub-characters observed were polymorphic (99.66%) and monomorphic (0.34%) in nature. Using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) at a 40% similarity coefficient, the existing accessions could result into 11 groups, with the highest similarity coefficient (72%) observed in Flickingeria trilamellata and Flickingeria sp. The relevant findings can serve as the reference for mitigating wild orchids in Bengkulu Province from extinction.
Wild orchid, landraces, morphological traits, phylogenetic tree, similarity matrix, cluster analysis
The wild orchids need preservation to save them from extinction. Natural orchids are an important genetic source to benefit the development of commercial orchids.