In the Republic of Moldova, in recent years, agrarians everywhere have been facing risks related to drought and extreme temperature increases during the cropping season. Modern potato breeding varieties have quickly replaced old local varieties - the latter were widely used as parental forms for hybridization, and many of them are hopelessly lost. Practically all released varieties of this crop are created and cultivated in other European countries, such as Germany, Netherlands, Poland, etc. Loss of local varieties and populations, which are an invaluable reserve of useful genes and the basis for new varieties, may lead to irreversible reduction of such important qualities for varieties as adaptability to local abiotic and biotic factors, plasticity to constant local changes in weather conditions. This is why it is of great importance for our country to carry out expeditions and collections, to evaluate for genetic variability and to preserve in a genetic bank local forms of potato from farms. During the expeditions, we collected a collection of local potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) populations, including 52 local potato accessions from different regions of the Republic of Moldova. These population lines were selected only if they had been cultivated for at least 5-10 years. It can also be assumed that during this period passive selection for productivity and resistance to diseases was carried out by the manager. But most importantly, these samples probably include old varieties that have already been lost and disappeared from markets and farmers' fields as a result of their displacement by more productive modern varieties. During the research, the collection of local potato forms was studied and described for 22 morphological, 5 phenological and 4 economic-value traits according to the descriptors. (Descriptors for the Cultivated Potato. IBPGR, Rome, 1977; Field data Descriptors of Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.), 2015; Potato Varieties Descriptors. IBPGR, 1985.) High biodiversity of accessions of local potato populations was shown for all morphological and phonological traits. Twelve accessions were selected, which are characterized by productivity and, according to the critical conditions of the breeding season 2023, can also be considered as the most heat- and drought-tolerant.