This international symposium on plant population genetics and genetic resources will bring together for the first time a rather impressive array of theoretical and applied plant geneticists. Many recent developments in plant breeding require a critical appraisal of our current knowledge of evolutionary processes which account for the rather ubiquitous biochemical and morphological variation in plant populations. As new genetic engineering approaches for plant improvement come into use, a new empirical and theoretical basis on which to combine the molecular and classical breeding methods is needed. A total of 34 invited talks will cover topics of variation assays, statistics of population structure, dynamics of colonizing species, genetic resources, and some molecular current topics. At this symposium, plant biologists from all these different fields will hopefully discover new ways of looking at variation, genetic recombination, adaptation, and crop development potentials.