Executive summary (Pdf.)	Background Adequate management of genetic resources is vital in counteracting the decline in variation which is present in crops and their wild relatives. Management of genetic resources can be carried out in situ (e.g. nature reserves), ex situ (e.g. genebanks) and on farm/ in garden (farmers, gardeners). This project was focussed on the improvement of the ex situ management of the genetic resources of leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, cichory, lamb’s lettuce and rucola. The project was necessary due to a number of reasons. First of all there were no adequate crop databases for spinach, chicory and minor leafy vegetables at the start of this project. Furthermore the international lettuce database needed serious updating. This implied that the European genebank community did not have a good overview of their stored leafy vegetable germplasm at the start of the project. A consequence of the lack of overview was that strategies to acquire new germplasm were insufficiently determined. As a third point safety duplication was lacking for part of the collections maintained by the partners, which is very risky. Fourthly there were serious backlogs in regeneration, characterization, and evaluation of the leafy vegetables collections of the partners meaning that collections managed by genebanks were not conserved in an optimal way. Last but not least there was limited access to trait data in leafy vegetable databases which made it difficult for the user to select the right accessions.
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