Modern breeding of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), which started 100 years ago, increased the number and the diversity of cultivated forms. In addition, for more than 50 years, wild sunflower and other Helianthus species have been collected in North America where they all originated. Collections of both cultivated and wild forms are maintained in gene banks in many countries where sunflower is an important crop. Cultivated material includes land races, open pollinated varieties, synthetics and inbred lines. The majority of wild accessions are ecotypes of wild Helianthus annuus, but also 52 other species of Helianthus and a few related genera. The USDA sunflower gene bank has been in Ames, Iowa since 1948. Majority of the wild accessions are wild H. annuus but the collection also contains more than 600 other wild annual and 900 perennial accessions. In France, the sunflower collection is maintained by INRA at Toulouse. The material includes wild Helianthus species and more than 2300 cultivated lines originating mostly from INRA. IFVCNS (Serbia) collection of wild species was founded in 1980 and primarily used for disease resistance interspecific breeding program. It now contains 21 perennial and 8 annual species. The Vavilov Research Institute for Plant Genetic Resources (Russia) is the oldest gene bank for sunflower, with the first entries in 1922 and more than 2200 accessions. DAI-General Toshevo (Bulgaria) maintains a collection as important initial material for research and breeding for resistance to abiotic and biotic stress factors. The INTA sunflower gene bank is located at Manfredi (Cordoba). The collection includes naturalized wild accessions from Argentina. ICAR-IIOR (India) coordinates sunflower network in India while ICARNBPGR facilitates import and maintenance. The INIA gene bank contains collection of confectionary type landraces collected in Spain. The collection at Turkey holds 942 locally collected confectionery and oilseed sunflower landraces. The available online platforms can be used to access information and genetic resources, but not all material is presented, nor available, even though significant collections also exist at IPK-Germany, NARDI-Romania, China, Canada and other countries. This abstract is based on: doi.org/10.1051/ocl/2020004