The history of the civilizations is deeply linked to the history of agriculture, and this has direct links to germplasm collecting and management. Plant collecting activities date back to the beginning of agriculture, with the first steps of plant domestication. Since the most remote times, mankind has depended on plant species collecting to address its basic needs. For the same reasons, or for cultural and economic reasons, for millennia, people collected and carried seeds, cuttings, seedlings and plants from the places they visited or settled in, and whenever they inhabited new places, they carried the species they knew and which cultivation they mastered. The germplasm collecting is an historic activity used in the conservation of genetic resources, especially species for food and agriculture and represents an activity of primary importance within the genetic resources conservation strategies. Germplasm collecting missions have the following main goals: to prevent genetic erosion; to expand or complete the genetic base available in the existent collections; and to meet specific needs (breeding programmes, research or development). Between 1977 and 2014, Banco Português de Germoplasma Vegetal (BPGV), carried out 126 collecting missions in Portugal, which resulted in 12,540 accessions of several species. The history of collecting plant genetic resourcesin the world, its connection to plant dissemination among the continents, and the plant germplasm collecting missions carried out by the BPGV in the last 40 years is the study object of this communication, in order to demonstrate the contribution of collecting missions to the valorisation of agro-biodiversity.
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