Agro-morphological characterisation and evaluation of a Serbian vineyard peach [Prunus persica (L.) Batsch] germplasm collection

Abstract Seventy-five vineyard peach [ Prunus persica (L.) Batsch] accessions, obtained by seed propagation and originating from different regions of Serbia, were characterized using a set of 39 agro-morphological traits. The evaluation was carried out over a 3-year period in a vineyard peach collection situated at the Radmilovac Experimental Station, owned by the Faculty of Agriculture, Belgrade University. To investigate diversity, descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses were used. Most studied traits showed high variability. The variability of descriptive traits was highly pronounced for fruit ground and flesh colour; regarding metric traits, the highest variation was recorded for trunk circumference, petal width, flower density, fruit set, fruit weight, sweetness index, fruit taste and fruit flavour. According to PCA, traits with high discriminating power were those related to flower type, colour and size, fruit size and presence of over colour, tree height, ripening time and fruit taste. The cluster analysis grouped accessions into three main clusters and a few sub-clusters. Agronomically-important traits allowed a clear separation between the clusters, while morphological traits had almost no impact on this. This study provided information that is important for assessing the biodiversity of vineyard peach accessions, to develop guidelines useful for the description, classification and conservation of valuable local germplasm. Moreover, the phenotypic variability in the vineyard peach collection was found to be very high, suggesting there is extensive genetic diversity available for peach cultivar and rootstock breeding programs.