INTRODUCTION

Olive (Olea europaea L.) is the most extensively cultivated fruit crop in the world (FAO, 2004). Its cultivation areas has tripled in the past 44 years, passing from 2.6 to 8.5 million of hectares. This emerging appeal is mainly due to the recognized nutritional value of its products combined to its tolerance to drought, salinity and almost total neglect. Despite this large expansion, intra-specific diversity of olive is threatened by several factors including the abandonment of marginal soils, biotic and abiotic stresses, urbanisation, replacement of old groves with other species and substitution of rustic cultivars with more productive ones. For purposes of conservation and sustainable utilization, it is therefore very important to know what cultivars exist, their characteristics and the collections in which they are preserved.

In 1998, the first edition of the "Olive Germplasm: Cultivars and World-Wide Collections" was developed by the Istituto per la Valorizzazione del Legno e delle Specie Arboree – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and published with the collaboration of the FAO Seed and Plant Genetic Resources Service (AGPS).
This unique publication was prepared by:

(i) conducting a comprehensive literature review of more than 800 references published in the last 100 years;

(ii) extracting information from these publications on cultivar names, including synonyms and homonyms, essential characteristics (purpose, fertility, productivity, oil content, rooting ability, stress tolerance and biochemical and/or molecular identification), areas of cultivation and genebank collections; and by

(iii) building a relational database on olive cultivars, which was made available on the Internet under the FAO World Information and Early Warning System on Plant Genetic Resources (WIEWS).

In addition, in 2002, FAO published a book on the "Classification, origin, diffusion and history of the olive" to provide updated information on taxonomy, geographical distribution and utilization of this fruit crop.

The new 2005 web edition of the "Olive Germplasm: Cultivars and World-Wide Collections" represents an update of the one published in 1998 and includes information extracted from 1,256 publications on 1,208 cultivars reported in 52 countries and conserved in 94 collections. In addition, new characteristics such as oil extraction and reactions to additional biotic stresses have also been included, as well as references to biochemical and molecular characterization.

As per the previous edition, my colleagues and I are very grateful to all the friends and colleagues who contributed their information, advice and views to make this publication possible.

Giorgio Bartolini
Istituto per la Valorizzazione del Legno e delle Specie Arboree - CNR
Florence, Italy
g.bartolini@ivalsa.cnr.it