Genebanks play an important role in the conservation of global plant biodiversity. The European Search Catalogue for Plant Genetic Resources (EURISCO) was created as a central entry point to provide information on these collections. However, a major challenge lies in the heterogeneity of scientific plant names. This makes the selection of suitable plant material, e.g. for research or breeding purposes, significantly more difficult. For this reason, the taxonomic backbone of EURISCO has been completely revised. Search terms entered by users are now automatically checked against taxonomic reference repositories, allowing a variety of synonyms to be identified. In addition, a fuzzy search has been implemented, which makes the search function tolerant of erroneous data (e.g. caused by typing errors). Besides improvements of the search interface, more support will be given to EURISCO's data providers. The new developments provide a tool that makes it easier to identify problem cases within the data, such as accepted/non-accepted taxonomic names, and will successively improve the quality of taxonomic information in EURISCO.

Given the increasing importance of data quality for the ex situ conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources (PGR), an indicator was created that quantifies the level of completeness of passport data. This passport data completeness index (PDCI) uses the presence or absence of data points in the documentation of a genebank accession, taking into account the presence or value of other data points. For example, a wild accession should have a well-defined collection site but no variety name. Any type of accession, wild, landrace, breeding material or modern variety, can attain a maximal score of ten for this index. The applicability of this index was tested on the complete contents of EURISCO, the European catalogue of ex situ maintained PGR containing over one million records. Analysis of the PDCI of the material in EURISCO provided valuable insight in the data quality of European collections. The PDCI can be used to identify datasets that might need additional attention and improvement or datasets that need more careful interpretation than others.

Taxonomy plays an essential role in genebank documentation. It is often the first level at which users search material, and it determines the protocols used in the management of collections. Especially, when plant genetic resources information is pooled in systems such as EURISCO, the European catalogue of ex situ plant genetic resources, problems regarding technical handling of taxonomic nomenclature, such as lack of standardization and low quality of data, become apparent. These problems were studied by analysing the content of EURISCO and mapping the taxon names in EURISCO on those used in the United States Department of Agriculture genebank system GRIN-Tax. Thus, the number of spelling errors and the level of standardization could be quantified and improved. An analysis of the content of EURISCO was made, showing a highly unbalanced distribution over crops: 50% of the accessions belong to ten genera only. Mapping EURISCO on the crops listed in Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture showed that 67% of the accessions in EURISCO belong to crops in that list.