Varietal dataset of nutritionally important Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet from Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India

Legumes are one of the important crops for food and nutritional security. According to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the collection and documentation of promising germplasms are essential for creating the global database and also for facilitating the global exchange for crop improvement and further exploitation. Presented here are varietal dataset of an agriculturally important legume, Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet, collected from eastern Uttar Pradesh of North India. Extensive field surveys were conducted for studying the occurrence and distribution of L. purpureus in six districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh (Ballia, Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Sonebhadra and Varanasi) and germplasms of promising varieties were collected, and cultivated for further characterization. Dataset provides the morphological traits such as variation in stem colour, leaf size, flower colour, pod colour, pod size, seed size, seed weight etc. of fourteen different varieties of L. purpureus grown in the field gene bank maintained by authors at Rajgarh block of Mirzapur district, eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Additionally, national and global distribution maps of L. purpureus was prepared using ArcGIS platform.


Data
Sustainable crop production for meeting the food and nutritional requirements of a rapidly growing human population is one of the major humanitarian crisis for this twenty first century and therefore, the creation of dataset regarding the occurrence, distribution and varietal diversity of nutritionally relevant crops are paramount important for framing suitable conservation measure and also for national and global food security [2e4]. In this context, the present study provides the varietal dataset of a nutritionally significant legume species. Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet is an ancient legume species cultivated throughout in Asia and African countries for food and nutritional security [1e4]. The dataset presented here is a national (Fig 1A) global distribution map of L. purpureus (Fig. 1B) (13); and AS-PCA-Lp (14), collected from six districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh (Ballia, Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Sonebhadra and Varanasi districts), north India. The details of surveyed sites are shown in Table (1). The colour plates showing the varietal diversity of L. purpureus is presented in Fig. (2), whereas the morphological variations in pods of L. purpureus such as colour, length, width, shape etc. is presented in Fig (3) and cluster grouping of L. purpureus based on pod length and pod width is presented in Fig. (4). Similarly, the diversity in seed size and shape of mature seeds and dried seeds are presented in Fig. (5) and Fig. (6), respectively.

Value of the Data
Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet is a nutritionally significant legume for human and animal consumption. Varietal dataset is important for maintaining the global database of such important species and also for crop breeding and agro-biodiversity conservation. National and global distribution maps are imperative for framing national and global conservation initiatives. Dataset will serve as a source of information to various stakeholders across the world, regarding crop diversification by intercropping with L. purpureus. (14)] cultivated in the field gene bank of L. purpureus maintained by authors at Rajgarh, Mirzapur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh., India.

Experimental design, materials, and methods
The data regarding the global distribution of L. purpureus was collected from published papers and also from international database for wild crops such as FAO (www.unfao.org), Tropical Forages (www. tropicalforage.info), Crop Wild Relatives (www.cwrdiversity.org), Biodiversity International (www. bioversityinternational.org), International Legume Database and Information Services (www.ildis. org) etc. and the distribution maps were developed using ArcGIS Desktop 10 (ESRI, Redlands, California, USA), ESRIs ArcMap™ 10.0 (Build 2414) for windows program. (Fig. 1A and 1B). Similarly, Fig. 1 (A). National distribution map of Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet, prepared on the basis information gathered from literature [11][12][13][14][15][16], database (www.lablab.org) as well as from direct field visit. The light purple colour shows the distribution range in India.  the distribution of L. purpureus in India was prepared based on the literature survey as well as direct field visit (Fig. 1B). The varietal dataset of L. purpureus presented here was obtained through three different steps such as (i) exploration of L. purpureus in eastern Uttar Pradesh (ii) Collection and characterization of promising germplasms and (iii) cultivation of promising species at the field gene  bank for data collection (Fig. 2). Additionally, cluster grouping of L. purpureus varieties were done according to their pod length and pod width.

Exploration of L. purpureus in Eastern Uttar Pradesh
Extensive field surveys were conducted in selected districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh (Ballia, Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Sonebhadra and Varanasi districts), India and information regarding the cultivation, usage and current status of L. purpureus in the study area was gathered through structured  questionnaire survey (Table 1). For this, 148 farmers were interviewed and identified the current cultivation localities/areas of L. purpureus and promising varieties were collected for characterization and further evaluation. The varieties were collected from diverse habitat such as kitchen garden/ backyard garden, road side, pond side, disturbed side and other geographical areas of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and field gene bank of these varieties is maintained at Rajgarh block of Mirzapur District of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India for further characterization and germplasm maintenance.   Lp (9); AS-PCA-Lp (10); AS-PCA-Lp (11); AS-PCA-Lp (12); AS-PCA-Lp (13); and AS-PCA-Lp (14) were selected for cultivating at the field gene bank (Fig. 3) for further characterization and standard agronomic practices including spacing pattern irrigation, manuring, crop diversification etc. were optimized for large-scale cultivation.

Cultivation of promising species and data collection
Selected varieties of L. purpureus were cultivated at the field gene bank for obtaining morphological traits. Standard agronomic practices were employed and varietal traits such as stem colour, leaf size, flower colour, pod length (Fig. 4), pod width (Fig. 5), seed size of mature seeds (Fig. 6), dried seeds ( Fig. 7) etc. were obtained for each and every varieties (Tables 2A & 2B). The data were presented as mean value ± standard deviation. The cluster grouping of L. purpureus was done using SPSS (version 16.0) for windows program (SPSS Inc., Chicago, USA).