In my view this is a useful book, given the increased global interest in plant biodiversity as a means of providing more stable and secure sources of food and non-food products (e.g. medicines, natural pesticides) to meet future threats, such as, climate change, population increases, rising food costs, withdrawal of many pesticides due to regulation, rapidly changing pest and disease threats.

However, the book suffers from heavy use of acronyms and abbreviations and from being a collection of proceedings papers with varying styles, depths of knowledge and diversity of topics. The various case studies are interesting but appear to be scattered in a semi-random way throughout the book, making it flow less well than it could have done. The short and longer chapters contain a great deal of interesting data and information, which should be of use to specialists in this field. I personally found the emphasis on databases and information management to be slightly excessive and would have preferred more emphasis on the value and potential uses of these genetic resources as, for example, food, ecological service providers and novel traits for plant breeding.

Parts VIII–X are of greatest value to generalist readers like myself, who are more interested in the ‘bigger picture’ and less interested in information systems. Overall this is an interesting book for specialists and generalists who want an overview of this important area.